Ajax Meets RFID

Like every solutions provider, JackBe tries very hard to share practical uses of its software and real-world success stories. I recently got a note from one of JackBe's Project Managers, Dr. Jerrold Prothero, and I thought it was a great example of Ajax 'moving beyond the technology' and moving into real-world business use:

This week, the RFID industry is holding its major conference, RFID World, in Dallas. You’ve probably heard about RFID. It’s basically “barcodes on steroids”, the next generation of product-tracking that is currently revolutionizing the supply chain industry.

RFID allows product information to be read automatically in bulk from a distance. For the first time, it makes it practical to get detailed, real-time information about where things are as they move from manufacturing through distribution to retail outlets. RFID dramatically increases supply chain visibility. And the technology is now in mature adoption, with RFID tag prices having dropped 60-70% over the last 12 months.

An intriguing new marriage is now starting to emerge between RFID and Ajax. RFID makes product information available; Ajax makes it possible to visualize and interact with this information over the web. IBM gave an RFID World presentation, 'Edge Computing Platforms - Innovative Capabilities through Item-Level Visibility' that discussed this theme and referenced JackBe software as an example of what is possible.

When you think about it, the potential for enterprise-grade Ajax environments in supply chain applications is huge. Products such as those developed by JackBe promote the ability to maintain situation awareness, by supporting rapid configuration and presentation of live data feeds; information sharing, by supporting a secure common workspace for information display; and collaboration, by supporting information update with governance controls. All of these issues are critical for the supply chain industry, with its reliance on extensive and fluid partnerships spread around the world.

Ajax and RFID. Let the games begin!

Of course, a short blog post probably doesn't do this topic justice. If you'd like to chat more on Ajax and RFID, you can reach Jerrold at jerrold.prothero@jackbe.com.

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Adobe Apollo is 'dead on arrival'

All I have heard for the past six months (by people like Ryan Stewart) is how great Apollo will be. Now people are actually able to take a look at it and the reviews are less than perfect. Read a short review on ZDNet. I'll let others' speak.

My favorite statement from the blog? "The biggest problem is the licensing. Apollo is a closed, proprietary system by intentional design. The runtime is closed, and the tools are expensive. While there is a free toolchain available, any serious development will most likely require the commercial tools. And don't hold out too much hope for significant open source competition. Adobe's licensing terms, which you have to accept to use their runtime and SDK, specifically prohibit it..."

'nuf said (for now).

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The Fifth Level of Ajax

I think that all Ajax vendors have been touting the benefits of 'improved user experience' as their value proposition for a while. The problem with this proposition is that it is very hard to quantify.

But, they are missing something. It isn't just about the "experience" but about empowering the user with a better view and access to any data source. Consider the "Four Levels of Ajax Adoption" from Ray Valdez at Gartner. Ray has said that the levels are:

1. Snippets
2. Widgets
3. Client Framework
4. Client-Server Framework

I think Ray is missing the next level. The 5th level should be 'User-driven Framework', a framework that has all of the benefits of level 4 but allows the user to be the one pulling and mashing any information that exists in the enterprise, the trusted partner's enterprise and the Web. This may seem to be a small difference, but in reality it is the difference between 'improved user experience' and 'improved access to information which gives the true competitive advantage'. And to most business users, that's an important distinction.

So, we suggest the 'Five Levels of Ajax Adoption' :

1. Snippets
2. Widgets
3. Client Framework
4. Client-Server Framework
5. User-Driven Framework
   

JackBe has embraced this idea through its new products, Dash, our dynamic interface for user-driven mashups, and Edge, our virtualization and mashup server. This is an emerging area and one we'll be talking about a lot in 2007.

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Ajax: Our baby is growing up!

Well, the craziness that is AjaxWorld East 2007 is over. But it was crazy in a good way. JackBe was a sponsor of the event for the second time and it was certainly worth it. It was a very well-run show and certainly a good example of how a well-executed and focused event can positively influence the growth and evolution of a technology and an industry. Jeremy, Carmen, Megan, Lauren and the rest of top-notch staff at Sys-Con have our compliments. They certainly make every effort to create a worthwhile event for vendors and attendees alike. We hope and expect the recordings of the conference presentations (including 3 by JackBe execs) to be online within a few weeks. Bonus points to you if you can name any of the gentlemen in the pictures from the show.

My corporate take on AjaxWorld is that it is definitive proof that Ajax as a technology is certainly growing up and doing so fast. As one attendee put it, ‘our Ajax baby is growing up’. Many of the common concerns about Ajax in years past are now being addressed, including issues like off-line support, security, and real-time messaging. These deep-dive technical questions were nicely balanced by big picture questions about the kinds of solutions that have been implemented and the business benefits that resulted. I’d say that the Ajax industry is moving through its ‘gangly teenager’ years quickly and is already looking towards its future as an adult.

On a personal note, I must say it was great as always to have the chance to shake hands (and even drink beer, in a few cases) with founders, CTOs, and big thinkers from movers-and-shakers like Cynergy, Dojo, Tibco, Helmi,Backbase, and IceSoft. Sure, some are competitors and normally I’d prefer you didn’t even know they existed. But putting my competitive hat aside for a few seconds, I think this is one of the overlooked qualities of this growing industry: it is still very personal. You can meet them, pick their brain, and get a real feeling for the solidity of their technologies.

So, after all this, what's next for JackBe? The Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the Moscone Center, April 15-18. This event isn’t focused on specific technologies like Ajax but more on the broad set of technologies/functionalities that sit under the ‘Web 2.0’ banner and the opportunities that they enable. Sticking to the Web 2.0 theme, we will be highlighting our work on Dash, our dynamic interface for user-driven mashups, and Edge, our virtualization and mashup server. If you are a west-coaster and want to come chat with JackBe in person at the Expo, we can help save you a bit of money. Go to http://www.web2expo.com/pub/w/53/register.html and, when prompted, enter code ‘webex07exb’ to get $100 off the normal registration fee. (If you are a student or government employee, there are other discounts available as well.) We hope to see ya there.

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Mashups Give SOAs a New Life via Forward Integration

I've been saying for while that we have to consider that Services within an SOA become 'instant legacy' and this is not a bad thing. Users don't own the services and generally cannot request changes to Services. Plus, future applications will be based on a sea of services, so you might as well get used to not being able to ask for any changes to the services. So, users and business developers must assume that services are forever immutable. So what's a user to do?

Mashups to the rescue. Mashups let the user do things forward of the Services to get the data in a form they can use. With transforms, conditions, filters and scripting, users can 'virtualize' the service and make the services much more useful to themselves. And, these new virtualized services are instantly reusable services themselves, serving as potential inputs to the next round of mashing.

This is very much the old airline reservation mainframe model. You can't mess with the 30 year old mainframes, so the innovation has to happen forward of the legacy.

I like to call this "Forward Integration". More on this later...

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Ajax is for real in 'Real-World Ajax'

There are a couple of new books on Enterprise 2.0 you may want to check out. First, from Sandy Carter at IBM, is ‘The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0’. It's a good look at what makes SOA projects work. But more important, as Joe McKendrick at ZD Net points out, the book elevates Web 2.0 to true enterprise-grade status. I couldn't agree more.

But we'd would be remiss if I didn’t give equal time to ‘Real-World Ajax’, a substantial effort from our friends Dion Hinchcliffe and Kate Allen. This type of work just proves that Ajax is ready for prime in the enterprise. Once you read it, we expect you'll agree. (In the interest of full disclosure: Yes, we are a bit biased, as there’s a nice section in there on JackBe’s Ajax Bank demo.)

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Business Value Continued….Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership Part 2

Well I’m back with some more ideas and thoughts about Web 2.0, the enabling technologies driving it, and the potential benefits for enterprises. I tend to focus on the technologies and the enterprise aspect of Web 2.0 simply because I get tired (am tired) of people defining it as simply a “social collaborative” movement. Although this is true, and great for my girlfriend who can blog and share her photos, this says little to the strategic impact that the underlying technologies, that make capable the social aspects, can have on the enterprise. Here are a few real universal business situations or rather timeless barriers to a better bottom line that technologies such as Ajax, Mashups, and a SOA can positively affect.

Quickly adapt to Changing Business Needs.

When organizations mandate a business process rule, such as a limit on the size of a particular type of business transaction, it is typically embedded deep within the application code. Finding, adjusting, and maintaining consistency with other systems can be error-prone and extremely time consuming and error-prone processes. By deploying such rules in a separate but integrated environment, organizations can empower business executives via a user interface to achieve extreme agility and oversight.

Effectively Monitor and Continuously Improve the Business

Systems information and transactional flows capture critical interactions that may be required for financial, contractual, regulatory, and business governance. Tracing and reporting audit data are tedious tasks and tenuously contingent on predefined conditions, including monitoring servers and client devices, coding predetermined subroutines to capture processing metrics, running batch routines for replication and reporting, and so forth. Due to the complexity of pulling this information together across a whole business process, the effort is often only made when critical issues arise. To avoid business risk, ongoing monitoring can be automatically captured by the abstracted process layer, which can trigger alerts, alternate process flows, provide automated reporting, and expose many other intelligence metrics. By reacting to early warnings a business can preempt situations that may cause undue and costly mistakes. Organizations may also seek to implement Six Sigma or regulatory initiatives via this type on mechanism.

Simplify Business Integration Efforts

Integration points that are incorporated and managed in close context to specific business processes will provide significantly more value. In the example, enterprise procurement activities are often scattered across multiple systems, where the collating, parsing, and regrouping of items to be sourced are typically very manual and labor-intensive processes. However, these processes can be centralized and automated into a composite application or mashup that avoids these inefficiencies.

Reduce Costs and Risks of Manual Processing

Many organizations still struggle trying to automate manual or paper-based transactions. Highly document-intensive composite application processes are very common targets for Web services. In the procurement example, a user may intervene in multiple places, introducing the potential to corrupt the process flow. With an orchestrated composite application, automated triggers engage users where and when necessary, removing the need for each individual to know every activity in the process required to continue the flow of a specific transaction.

Leverage Existing Systems and Resources

Reusability of code not only saver resource efforts in development and maintenance, it also impacts application quality and security. By utilizing a standardized framework, companies can focus skills development across a variety of systems and solutions to prevent these effects.

Again, these are just a few examples but I and JackBe believe it is these types of scenarios that are not as highly publicized at the moment (overshadowed by the Youttube/myspace buzz) but will at the end of the day drive real business value to the mass.

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Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership

What is all the Web 2.0, Ajax, Enterprise 2.0, SOA buzz in the driving towards? What does it mean for the line-of-business manager or the enterprise itself? I thought I’d take a moment at breaking down how the approaches/ideas and supporting technologies could positively impact the underlying business books. As to not make this to vague, I’ll take the latest hallmark of Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, and a classic financial benchmark Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and we’ll deconstruct how this latest set of technologies and techniques stands up against an old benchmark.

The TCO of a solution must take into account the initial and ongoing costs of the solution, relative to the solution it replaces. Enterprise Mashups (which are closely related to composite applications if not the same depending on one’s definition) are based upon a SOA and have the potential to lower TCO in several ways, including:

• Managing the Services in an SOA is less expensive and complex than managing the interfaces in a traditional integration solution.

• By leveraging the Web Services standards, mashups can lower the cost of proprietary technologies. Standards level the competitive playing field for vendors by lowering prices generally, and also simplify the task of integration, lowering costs directly.

• Business analysts and technical business users are able to compose applications without the involvement of more expensive IT personnel.

• The more complex a business change is, the more effective SOA-based mashups can be at reducing the TCO of the solution because of their inherently flexible nature.

Fundamentally, a SOA provides business an “agility quotient” – the more complex the underlying infrastructure and the more dynamic the business environment, the greater the benefit of an agile architecture to the business. SOAs provide the ability for business users to create enterprise mashups, thus creating and managing business processes.

Where am I going with all of this and how does it fit into the world of Ajax, RIA, or JackBe for that matter? There is one important piece yet missing – the user interface itself. If the tools that users interact with aren’t agile themselves, the benefits of these enterprise mashups to the organization risk being lost. The services that contribute to a mashup can now be consumed by light-weight client models thanks to Ajax. This is why the integration layer will be driven by those who are experienced with client side models. The back-end can do their part, expose the services, which they have or are doing so, but they aren’t going to be able to create what is truly needed for the consumption because this is not there expertise. The services are moving out farther-the power of the apps as well-to the client so it only makes sense that the driver of this integration will be through the client tier experts and more specifically, those skilled in Ajax.

Later, I’ll attempt to address the benefits of incorporating SOA, Ajax, and Mashups into the enterprise to more strategic business benefits. Please feel free to leave your comments and opinions.

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'REA is to RIA as Enterprise Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0' Returns!

I posted this a little while back, and the thoughts were expanded by our CTO, John Crupi in TechNewsWorld. Rich Enterprise Applications enable developers to create new situational applications that can offer improved usability and flexibility for the end user, and can deliver them faster than was possible using traditional approaches. This can empower users to easily assemble situational applications in response to rapid changing business requirements. Click the link to read the full article.

2007 is the year enterprises will start to more aggresively push for ways to realize the benefits of the Web 2.0 paragim shift and bring these efficiencies into the enterprise construct. In short, to empower users to consume, compose, and collaborate in ways that still adhere to enterprise standards and requirements.

Original post.....
Tuesday, October 03, 2006

REA is to RIA, as Enterprise Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0

MikeWagner
JackBe coined the term Rich Enterprise Applications (REA) as an evolution of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIA is to Web-grade applications as REA is to Enterprise-grade applications. The side pic. is my personal attempt to illustrate this visually. Some like it; some don’t, so comments are more than welcomed.
So What is Enterprise Grade?

Enterprises require tighter control, security, and reliability. In short they require a degree of governance that the average user building a Google Maps Mashup while sitting at their kitchen table doesn’t need. This should be no surprise to anyone who has worked for large organizations.

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