An interesting chart from Dion Hinchcliffe.
SOA is going to actually be WOA, mmm. Just when you thought it was safe to go for a swim. Michael Meehan takes the pulse of architects.
What is the equivalent BPM technology in the WOA world? Are mashups my business process? Are we going to be able to use BPMN to generate BPEL4Resources (like BPEL4People, sorry I couldn’t resist). Or could a user build the mash-up application on ‘the glass’ and have this be the design for translation into an executable for the server? Well, perhaps BPM from SOA is BPM in WOA, let’s hope so.
Project Zero has this to say:
“There are other design patterns for segmenting the overall mashup into a client and a server side… the basic idea is to push complex or relatively stable aspects of the overall mashup to the server and focus the client side on aspects likely to change and in support of dynamic exploration of information by mashup clients… an example would be a “task flow” pattern mixing presentation mashup with server-side software mashups that realize tasks kicked off on the client by scripting interaction of a set of RESTful services… or, in the “page flow” pattern one would break the mashup script guiding a user through interactions to perform a task (e.g., filling out an order form) into a coarse grained flow that drives the overall process (think milestones like selecting goods, filling in personal details) augmented by client side mashup snippets that allow users to improvise (i.e., freely switch between pages) to perform the individual tasks…”
I need to play with some mashup tools, but for the moment open source isn’t well represented in the sector. This I find quite counter-intuitive, since if there is one area where open source must clearly have an unfair advantage it is WOA, given the importance of networks for web success.
There are 3? open source offerings, all focussed on data integration:
- “The WSO2 Mashup Server is a platform for creating, deploying, and consuming Web services Mashups in the simplest fashion possible.” Apache 2.0.
- “mashup developers need a scalable way to extract, transform and load large data sets between data sources and targets. Apatar helps users and mashup developers to join their on-premise data sources with the web and Office 2.0 applications without coding.”
- “SnapLogic is an Open Source Data Integration framework that combines the power of dynamic programming languages with standard Web interfaces to solve today’s most pressing problems in data integration.”
IBM’s project zero feels like it’s open source, but isn’t. Although the tool is freely downloadable for playing about with.
So, the question is, how far off are organisations from using WOA/Web2.0 in the UK (where, let’s face it, open source penetration is also appalling) … when generation Y* becomes CXX, I guess.
* [or baby-boomers who haven't grown-up, if you know what I mean]
