<<AJAX remains one of the hotter topics around the industry with the
initial excitement now translating into actual product announcements
most recently Tibco and JackBe. A lot of these announcements are
linking strongly back into the SOA space and the cynical eye might
suspect some bandwagon jumping is underway however this time I am
not in the cynic's camp.
JackBe, a company with a strong ex-Sun contingent, has announced its
Presto platform will be released in the first quarter of 2007. This
will support the creation of rich clients for SOA which are
"Situational Applications". Situational Applications are applications
rapidly developed to solve a specific requirement and are typically
written by developers with less technical skills and more context
knowledge. To put it another way according to Dan Gisolfi, a Certified
IBM Executive IT Architect:
"Situational applications are a way for people with domain
expertise to create applications in a very short time. Many IT shops
have a backlog of small little projects that their customers want. If
it takes 3 weeks to get to a project, the need is gone before the
developer even starts coding. We want to give knowledge workers the
tools to solve their own problems."
You might ask what that has to do with SOA. Of course, traditional
middleware had little need for interfaces except for management
purposes and message repair type facilities as all the user
interaction occurred within applications. While this line has been
blurring for quite a long time as the EAI vendors added Business
Intelligence layers the generic need for rich client capabilities
was limited and this was reflected in features provided in most
middleware products.
As you move into the SOA world, you are deploying more business
processes into the middleware and more of the business processing
resides there. Therefore it makes sense to allow direct user
interaction with this layer and using AJAX is of course a way to write
these rich user-focused clients. However, JackBe has gone further by
realising that simply addressing the presentation and interaction side
is not sufficient. If something will be deployed into SOA, it must be
capable of conforming to the SOA governance rules and being a "good
SOA citizen".
Finally, what makes their offering a platform for situational
applications rather than a generic rich client platform is what they
call their "Enterprise Mashup Server" which acts as a consolidation
point for the various services and streams of data that will be
presented to the users. Of course as the use of the word Mashup
suggests, the focus is on making it easy to create new client
interface/applications from the available services and data streams.
All of which is clearly of potential benefit within any SOA based
enterprise. However, I have two caveats. The first is the use of the
term AJAX Service Bus I am not sure we really need to invent a new
term. The second, more serious one is the claim by JackBe of creating
"situational applications", a claim echoed by Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink:
"The Presto platform is poised to take advantage of the
opportunity where enterprises are looking to enable business users to
compose services into SOBAs (Service-Oriented Business Applications)
that implement business processes in a flexible, agile manner."
Will this really allow business users to do it themselves? This has
been the promise of all sorts of client-side software for as long as I
can remember (second only to the claim that programs will be
auto-generated by modeling tools!). I can see how it will make it
easier and require less technical skills for developers to build these
situational applications. However, based on the webcam demo I watched,
I remain to be convinced that it will really allow non-developers to
start work. Having said that, I haven't seen the released software yet
and so I could be wrong!>>
You can find this blog at:
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/soaroads/2006/10/jackbe_nimble_ajax_clients_for.php
Gervas
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