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.

Leveraging Legacy Data And Web Assets For SOA Rapid Application Development

In 2009, SOA professionals will face the challenge of integrating legacy data and web assets into their SOA (ZapThink, 2008). The major factors in this trend are due to: 1)the heterogeneous nature of the systems and data and 2)increasing IT resource constraints.

Fortunately, there is a new class of tools that’s built specifically for data integration and rapid application development in a SOA context. And with these innovative tools come a necessary strategy shift in the way that SOA projects are approached and completed. “Big bang” projects will disappear, and iterative, more agile projects will be the norm.

Join the experts at ZapThink and Kapow Technologies to see how you can save precious time and budget dollars over the course of your SOA projects – making the difference between success and failure in today’s increasingly challenging environment. Also, see how Fortune 500 and fast-growth companies have made this a reality.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Tackle integration complexities of your legacy data and web assets
• Deploy your business critical apps in days and weeks vs. month and years
• Save yourself time and money with rapid application development for SOA

Read more at: TheServerSide

ZapForum Podcast: Leveraging Legacy, Data, & Web Assets for SOA Rapid Application Development

ZapForum Podcast for January 26, 2009 features

Guest Experts Stefan Andreasen, Founder and CTO, Kapow Technologies, and Ron Yu, Head of Marketing,
Kapow Technologies.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• understand what’s wrong with traditional application development
• learn about rapid application development inthe SOA context
• understand how data access issues impact the requirements gathering process

Setting the Stage: ZapThink Analysts

ZapThink analysts Ron Schmelzer and Jason Bloomberg set the stage by discussing the role data access plays in SOA initiatives.

Next, Stefan Andreasen and Ron Yu discuss rapid application development in the SOA context, and how data access is a critical part of the application modernization benefit of SOA. Next, they discuss how the presentation layer fits into the picture of SOA-based RAD, and how that in turn ties to Web 2.0. Finally, they discuss some customer examples.

Kapow Mashup Server 6.5 Extends Capabilities to Provide More Powerful Business-Critical Web Services and Mashups

“As the complexity of service-oriented and mashup applications continues to increase, it’s critical that vendor solutions integrate seamlessly with enterprise-class systems management environments,” said Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner at ZapThink. “Kapow Mashup Server, complete with comprehensive APIs and advanced standards support, ensures that companies can leverage their existing enterprise systems to create new breakthrough applications with data from inside the enterprise and on the Web.”

Read more at: Marketwatch

Kapow Technologies: Turning the Web into the World’s Largest Database

The use of unstructured data within enterprises today has been more art than science, and in most cases an opportunity that many people have yet to understand. Truth-be-told, there are terabytes and terabytes of useful information throughout the enterprise and the World Wide Web that if placed into the proper context could have an ROI much higher than existing data mining approaches.

Access to this unstructured information has been out of reach of many enterprises today due to the cost and complexity of the technology. However, with the Kapow Technologies offering, enterprises now have an on-demand mechanism for searching, grabbing, refining, and understanding unstructured data, and can place them in the context of enterprise data for even more value.

In addition, in the emerging world of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Kapow is also providing customers with the ability to address unstructured data as Services, thus providing an on-ramp for any data source for use within mashups in the SOA environment.

New mashup tools look to penetrate IT

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, a Baltimore-based consulting firm, said that although “mashups are becoming killer use cases for SOA,” IT managers need to be careful when using the technology.

For example, they must make sure that data collected by the mashup tools meets corporate governance guidelines. “You can’t just let anybody mash up anything. All [of] that has to fit into the governance framework an organization has,” said Bloomberg.

Read more at: The Industry Standard

Kapow Fires OnDemand Shot in Mashup Wars

“Obtaining access to data, converting unstructured data formats and IT governance are among the top issues hampering enterprise mashup deployments today,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “Kapow OnDemand removes these barriers. Business analysts now have the ability to create automated robots that collect and integrate Web data directly into Excel, which is one of the most pervasive desktop environments in use today. Meanwhile, IT departments have a solution that gives them more control and choice in their level of involvement with mashup and Web intelligence projects.”

Read more at: eWeek