The Merging of SOA and Web 2.0

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, said mashups complement SOA. “You’re getting capabilities or functionality from a Web application and combining it with another capability, and mashups are made a heck of a lot simpler if they’re made of services that are service-oriented,” Schmelzer said. “It’s also a plus because of the user interaction.”

The new Web 2.0-enabled enterprise is sort of “like the long-tail approach–there is more opportunity in catering to a mass of niches than a niche of masses,” Schmelzer said. Enterprises can use Web 2.0 and SOA to enable line-of-business staff to create hundreds of applications that will benefit many in their organizations. “The downside to all this freedom is the control,” Schmelzer said. “The problem is, if you build all these services, how do you prevent people from doing harm?”

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, said SOA is not about connecting things but, rather, enabling business processes and continual change. The goal is to allow users to build applications out of services, Bloomberg said. “We’re really talking about service automation,” Bloomberg said. “Service-oriented business applications [SOBAs] are composite applications [made up] of services that implement a business process.”

SOA puts greater power into the hands of the business user, and “SOBAs are most appropriate when the business requires exceptional flexibility,” Bloomberg said. “What’s happening now in the SOA world is we’re reaching the services tipping point–from a focus on building services to consuming services. This has given rise to the mashup. A mashup is a flexible composition of services within a rich user interface environment.”

Governance is key to the enterprise mashup, Bloomberg said. Without it, mashups are dangerous. “Without SOA, mashups are toys,” he said. “Some business users will build mashups as tools mature. The tools are still too technical. There will be an expanding role for business analysts, but for now IT will do the mashing up for the business. The majority of business users will not do any applications.”

Read more at: eWeek

JackBe’s Presto Jazzes Up Look of SOA

“There are scores of new products designed to accelerate AJAX development and client-side mashup of Web services,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “What makes JackBe’s Presto platform unique is its central focus on SOA service governance. JackBe clearly understands that governance, scalability and reliability are critical factors for enterprises as they leverage SOA and AJAX to create the next generation of rich enterprise applications.”

Read more at: SD Times

Ajax emerging as RIA alternative of choice, says Burton

However, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., remains skeptical of the JSF tools.

“We’ve seen one other vendors tout the benefits of JavaServer Faces — ICEsoft out of Calgary,” Bloomberg says. “They also offer a JSF approach for creating Ajax apps without the need for scripting in JavaScript. An additional benefit is that it deals with cross-browser issues, but the downside is that it’s a Java tool only for Java developers. In my opinion, these JSF-based approaches will remain niche players, while the language-neutral guys like Nexaweb and JackBe, as well as incumbents like Adobe and Microsoft, will become established as the leading players.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

ZapForum Podcast: Building Rich Enterprise Applications

ZapForum Podcast for December 26, 2006 features

Guest Expert John Crupi, Chief Technology Officer, JackBe.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Understand the terms Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, and Ajax
• Learn how Ajax is the key to the Rich Enterprise Application
• Explore the close relationship between Ajax and SOA

CEO Technology Guide: Mashups

Enterprise Mashups Podcast
Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst and principal at consulting firm ZapThink, talks about how companies can take advantage of Web applications that combine content from two or more online sources

Read more at: BusinessWeek

Big Companies Embracing Software Mashups

Experts say that although enterprise mashups promise to help make software development easier, they also present a new set of challenges. One of the key characteristics of enterprise mashups is that they put more power in the hands of end users. “The average I.T. establishment is reluctant to give users more power,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consulting firm ZapThink. The answer, he says, is for the I.T. department to provide oversight, defining what kinds of mashups are allowed, and then to govern that process. Software and service vendors can help companies implement management tools.

Read more at: CIO Today

JackBe: Platform for Enterprise Mashups

Mashups are collaborative compositions of online capabilities within rich user interfaces, while Service-Oriented Business Applications are declarative compositions of Services within the context of a Service-Oriented Architecture implementation. Today, these two concepts are merging into the Enterprise Mashup, a governed, secure composition of Services within a rich user environment.

For the vision of the Enterprise Mashup to become a reality, however, enterprises require sophisticated tools that not only enable the creation of such mashups, but also their effective governance and management. Emerging platforms that provide such capabilities, such as the JackBe Presto REA Platform, provide for these advanced governance, scalability, loose coupling, and rich user interface capabilities necessary to empower business users to use, and eventually create, their own Enterprise Mashups.

JackBe Unveils Rich Enterprise Application (REA) Platform to Accelerate Business Value from SOA Investments

JackBe Unveils Rich Enterprise Application (REA) Platform to
Accelerate Business Value from SOA Investments

JackBe’s Presto

Nexaweb and JackBe Take Web 2 to the Enterprise

”What you have to remember about a show like AjaxWorld is that Ajax is a technology, not a market, not a business,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. ”So a lot of the vendors are really just hobbyists. They don’t have a business model. They’re just doing cool things.”

But for my money–and Bloomberg’s–the coolest things at this event were all about the concept of ”enterprise Web 2.0,” as exemplified by Nexaweb Technologies and JackBe.

”Nexaweb has been focusing on enterprise applications, which really distinguishes them in the Web 2.0 crowd,” Bloomberg says. ”This is a company that is solving real business problems, and they started off with that focus.”

That governance piece is the key to the enterprise for this generation of Web-based apps, says Bloomberg. ZapThink views the emergence of Web 2.0 as a natural evolution of the SOA, in which loosely coupled software services provide the business processes. The SOA infrastructure is necessary to guarantee the loose coupling, without which, Bloomberg says, ”things like mashups are little more than toys from an enterprise perspective.”

The ASB is an interesting variation on the ESB. ”The idea there is to support the rich Internet interface (client piece), the composite applications (server piece), and then they the connection,” explains Bloomberg. ”So you can build mashups without worrying about http problems. The ASB eases the perspective of the developer, as well as the business user, who is now able to leverage this enterprise Web capability without having to worry about a lot of that nuts and bolts technical stuff.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

JackBe Unveils Rich Enterprise Application (REA) Platform to

“There are scores of new products designed to accelerate Ajax development and client-side mashup of Web services,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “What makes JackBe’s Presto platform unique is its central focus on SOA service governance. JackBe clearly understands that governance, scalability and reliability are critical factors for enterprises as they leverage SOA and Ajax to create the next generation of rich enterprise applications.”

Read more at: JackBe Press Release