Evolution of the Rich Internet Application Market

As the Internet continues to penetrate every aspect of our lives, both business and personal, the distinction between “Internet application” and “application” increasingly fades from view. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) operate in the sweet spot among richness of Internet capability, richness of user interactivity, and richness of client-side computing capability. RIAs act as Service consumers as part of Service-Oriented Architecture implementations and enable Enterprise Mashups.

Since ZapThink first covered the space in 2002, the RIA market has matured considerably, establishing two core submarkets: RIA environments and RIA components. Adobe Systems emerging as a leader in the RIA environments submarket with their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and Flex products. Microsoft is a strong contender with their newer Silverlight technology. Open source vendors have emerged as significant players, and form a large portion of the RIA components submarket.

While the RIA market should continue to grow for the next few years, it will most likely merge with other markets long term and be indifferentiable from a market sizing perspective as the RIA category increasingly overlaps with other existing desktop and Internet application categories.

Eclipse joins JCP, OMG and OSGi alliance

“Eclipse is definitely reaching out to Sun and this will benefit Java developers in terms of greater flexibility and increased choice,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. “I think the timing is the result of the progress Sun is making toward open-sourcing Java. As that initiative progresses, I’d expect to see greater synergies across the board between Java and various open source and vendor neutral efforts.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

The SOA Forecast for 2007

For those in the United States, 2007 has started out with a bang — two major snow storms in the Rocky Mountains and a persistent warm front that’s keeping the entire East Coast in unusually warm weather for this time of year. Even more so, it’s football season in the …

The top SOA/Web services stories of 2006, part 1

Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, sees WS-Policy as a good first step, but warns that it only establishes a container for sharing policies, not the vocabulary for declaring the policies themselves.

“It’s necessary, but not sufficient,” he said. “It’s not enough to solve the problems of policy interoperability by itself.”

Both he and Schmelzer believe agile has emerged as a best practice for development.

Schmelzer viewed much of the changes as attempts to fit the enterprise service bus into a sensible SOA infrastructure. In particular he’s down on the notion of the ESB as the central cog in an SOA software stack.

“I think the idea of the SOA mega-suite is too un-SOA in philosophy,” he said.

Both he and Schmelzer agreed that Eclipse has become the main integrated development environment for those not inside the Microsoft cloud. Schmelzer praised it for reinforcing the SOA concept of modularity during design time.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Cape Clear Joins Eclipse

“Cape Clear joining Eclipse is probably notable only in that it shows that Eclipse has reached the point where it’s now the default IDE of choice for most vendors,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC., in Waltham, Mass. “Indeed, there is very little value in startup and emerging technology vendors developing their own IDE, so I think we’re finally at that point.”

Read more at: eWeek

Iona takes lead in new Eclipse SOA project

There are some unique aspects to SOA development versus traditional component development, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, Waltham, Mass. “The most important asset is the contract — the meta data, documents that describe how something works. There are not many good tools for creating meta data. Most vendors are producing their own tools. So one common environment makes sense, as long as you have a bunch of people willing to support what comes out of it.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Borland upgrades IDE as open source alternatives loom

“I do see Eclipse eating away at the non-Microsoft IDE environment, but I think that it doesn’t threaten Microsoft’s IDE at all,” added Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, also in an e-mail.

“Going forward, I think there’s little incentive for companies to create new IDEs, and even for many companies with proprietary IDEs to continue developing them in the face of what’s becoming increasingly and more widely accepted as a ‘universal’ IDE for non-Microsoft environments,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Eclipse SOA project inching closer to launch

ZapThink LLC analyst Ron Schmelzer said Eclipse might be able to bring some needed common functionality to the work of SOA development.

“With design-time tooling, there’s a lot of room for improvement,” he said.

Yet Schmelzer also cautioned that it would be how vendors blend those design-time tools with their runtime environments that would determine the ultimate success of Eclipse’s SOA efforts.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Progress Software joins Eclipse

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, called Progress’s participation in Eclipse “great news.”

“In general, there is an inevitable trend towards any development environment using Eclipse as its IDE,” Schmelzer said in an e-mail. “Most companies now realize there’s little value in developing and promoting their own development environment over using what’s now becoming a very popular platform. So, Eclipse is the way to go! Expect to see more such announcements.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

Borland, Macromedia back Eclipse

“What makes [the Eclipse plug-in] compelling is that Macromedia is now targeting the mainstream developer audience for their rich user interface apps, whereas before they targeted a more specialized designer audience,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

Read more at: InfoWorld