Ajax Application Patterns

Since I think in Patterns and JackBe has done lots of Ajax in the last few years, I've tried to organize all the work we’d done as a set of Ajax application patterns. I was able to whittle it down to three:

1. The first (obvious) pattern was simple: down-and-dirty Web Apps. Take any old client-server application, applications you need but haven’t gotten around to building, and new enterprise class applications and move them to the browser using Ajax. You’ve probably seen examples of this in the consumer world like self-service travel or account access & bill payment, and in the enterprise world, ‘SaaS’ apps like on-line CRM/ERP. We’ve even done this in one instance where the application was supposed to look exactly like its client-server predecessor. Admittedly, it wasn’t terribly sexy-looking, since the original app was many years old. The application owners wanted to deploy new features easily but didn’t want to retrain a workforce of 10,000+. They got the best of both worlds.
2. A second (less obvious) Ajax application pattern is the Dynamic Desktop. You give users easy access to sources of data and logic, easy ways to integrate them, and easy ways to apply visual skins, such as graphs and maps. While this is certainly a popular style in the consumer world, enterprises always have higher requirements in areas like security, governance, and scalability. This application pattern works well in areas where knowledge workers have ever-changing information needs. Think call center staff or anyone with ‘analyst’ in their title. The coolest example I know of is the briefing dashboard we’ve developed for the DIA.
3. Finally, the least obvious, but the one I think has the most potential is the 'Web Embeddable'. In this case, the emphasis is on embedding business functionality into a page as a black box. Pretty much like Google Maps, except for the enterprise. The Web Embeddable is delivered from the enterprise data center and all communication between it and the data center is handled out of the box. Many people might think I am talking about snippets and widgets like popup calendars and sliders. This is not that. Think about a mini home loan approval application. Instead of going to a LendingTree.com site to apply, why not have Lending Tree develop a Web Embeddable and syndicate it? Let anyone embed it and get a cut from Lending Tree. Seems to make sense to me (we call this Application Syndication). JackBe did this for a recent customer. We built an e-commerce checkout Web Embeddable that did full catalog and shopping management. The beauty is it doesn't care where it's running because all communication from the application to the data center is self managed and secure. This makes for a wonderful user experence and that is always good for business.
   

So, which Ajax application pattern have you used?

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Web 2.0 in the Top Secret world

One of JackBe's customers, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is spotlighted in Computerworld. It's a nice, concise summary of Web 2.0 technologies and their use within the highly-secure, high-demand world of intelligence gathering and analysis.

Sure, it's a bit self-serving to blog about one of our own customers in the news. But it's not every day that the generally-secretive folks in the intelligence community talk about the tools they use in their world. We're very proud of our work with them! And there might even be a few lessons you could learn from their work.

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The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0 is the perfect pair of pants!

I spent last weekend searching for pants. I had a need. I looked for pants that were comfortable in the winter and summer but would always ‘breath’, the right material so they would last, and also pants that would be acceptable for multiple occasions. The problem is I couldn’t find a pair that met all these needs. I had to buy multiple pairs. I settled on the only solution that was available at that time. I will have to adapt the right solution (many pants) instead of having one solution (one pair of pants) that adjusts to my needs, when I need something different as situations arise.

I want a pair of pants that could change on-the-fly (no pun intended) easily; adapting to the environment and occasion as I see fit.

Well, we might not be able to do this with pants but now we can with Enterprise Applications. In fact, this type of flexibility, customization and efficiency of a solution that adapts to multiple needs will be the standard in five years time. Three forces are aligning to make this happen.

• Web 2.0 – user empowerment and customization
• Ajax – technology techniques to bring richness and back-end interactions to the user
• Services – Exposed through SOA or other, services are the enterprise applications building block of tomorrow.

These forces are aligned to support the next generation of Enterprise Applications that will be common place in 5 years. These applications will be browser-based. They will unlock the value of information previously contained in separate silos through granular services. With AJAX client side technology, they will consume these assets and allow users to interact in a rich and dynamic fashion. And with the 2.0 social networking and collaboration aspect, the tilting of the IT pendulum back towards the client side leads to more empowered end users capable of generating content and even their own ad-hoc, mashup applications.

Now you can customize your organizations applications to your needs instead of forcing your employees to adjust to a heavyweight, monolithic solution that might not be a right fit for their need. Even further, you can empower your employees to further tailor the solution to meet a particular situational need when they need to.

Why will these applications be the standard?

This new paradigm is difficult for some to grasp. We have been offered large solutions that we had to make fit into our organization and make work for what we had to get done in our jobs. But the productivity that these applications brought to transactional activities is drying up. The future is focused on the knowledge worker who has tacit activities to accomplish and where no solution has arguably truly demonstrated much benefit with regards to optimizing these people’s situational activities.

This is where organizations can increase productivity. The problem is that because of economy of scale past applications couldn’t be developed to meet these situational, micro activities needs. The technologies weren’t all there, understood enough, or further, understood in the context of their synergistic relationships which yield the capabilities to meet these knowledge workers activities needs.

The Enterprise Web 2.0 Application can. It can because the forces listed above are now converging. Enterprise Web 2.0 is a natural evolution of consumer facing Web 2.0 Applications. Web 2.0 has introduced public consumer users to its benefits and now enterprises have begun to catch on to the technologies and techniques to further their web-based applications; to leverage existing assets, whether it be data locked behind a firewall or intellectual knowledge locked in your employees heads.

I can’t wait to see what unfolds this year! (pun intended)

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The Age of Good Participation for Jim Gray

If you really want to see the Web 2.0 potential and do something good at the same time, help find Jim Gray from Microsoft. The renowned Microsoft computer scientist was reported missing at sea this week. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) is being used to facilitate satellite imagery examination. Who is doing this? Everyone and everyone. Go to the following link to help:

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=J0XZ58STDWJZ5QY4F9M0

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk commoditizes user activity tasking. When a company or person needs a human to complete a discrete task, whether complete or part of a larger set of tasks, it offers the tasks to anyone (and sometimes for pay) who is capable of completing. Think of the possibilities here. You have a task and don’t care who does it. Why don’t you care? Because, you have commoditized the task to the point where you trust the worker enough to let them do the work. In the case of Jim Gray, Amazon, the sponsor, trusts any user who is interested in helping.We’ve seen the the monetary potential of Web 2.0 and universal participation with YouTube, MySpace, etc. But, in this case, we are all participating for the good of finding Jim Gray.

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