I am here on the first day of AjaxWorld in Santa Clara, California. The conference just kicked off and JackBe started the day on a great note. This morning we were noted by the The Wall Street Journal in an article titled Do-It-Yourself Software!
Over the past few weeks our team has been busy working on a set of cool new innovations to be included in our Presto product. But I am kicking myself for not have written up some of those innovations prior to their unveiling. So here's a brief outline of those technologies and an invitation to stop by our booth here at AjaxWorld for a more detailed walk-through of some of our new innovations:
- Wires - our user-friendly enterprise mashup designer and composer (read the InfoWorld article here),
- Mashlets - our mashup visualization that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms including portals, RIAs, Wikis, blogs and just any old web sites,
- Edge Enterprise Mashup Server - our flagship product in our Presto product suite,
- JackBe Mashup Markup Language or JMML - our declarative mashup language,
- JackBe Universal Messaging Protocol or JUMP - our JSON based application protocol.
We will be writing more about these topics in detail and have more
screencasts up soon. Meanwhile, if you are at the conference, check these out!
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It's only Thursday morning, and I've already had a pretty full week. I got to stay at 'The Second Home of Elvis'. I got to eat with Caesar. And I got to hang out with 20+ Gartner analysts. Where was I? I was at GartnerPalooza (my name, not theirs!), three concurrent Gartner Summits in Las Vegas: 'Portals, Content & Collaboration', 'Web Innovations', and 'Open Source'. For those of you who weren't lucky enough to be there and lose money at the blackjack table like me, I thought you might like a summary of at least a few of the mashup-related items from the event.
First and foremost, it a bit exciting to note mashups are now officially at the peak of the Gartner 'Hype Cycle'. This is interesting as mashups were unheard of a mere 18 months ago and have now leap-frogged some notable but apparently slower trends. On a related front, there are also 3 recent Gartner reports that cover the enterprise mashup world: 'Who's Who in Enterprise 'Mashup' Technologies', 'Reference Architecture for Enterprise 'Mashups'', and ''Mashups' and Their Relevance to the Enterprise'. You might want to check them out if you are a Gartner subscriber and, if not, check out the ZapThink note on our website, 'JackBe Platform for Enterprise Mashups'.
I've made note in the recent past that mashups are hand-in-glove with SOA efforts. Interestingly, Ray Valdes seems to agree and goes one step further, describing mashups as a means to fulfill some of the unkept promises of enterprise portals. Mashups, along with a supporting SOA effort, can bring elements of self-fulfillment and simplicity that are lacking in the enterprise portal packages today, he says. While I don't think I do it justice here, Ray weaves mashups, SOA, and portals together in a compelling, synergistic way.
David Gootzit talked about the 'Portal of the Future' and mashups are a key actor in the tale he told. David described portals as an 'important' entry point for enterprise mashups. More interestingly, he outlined key areas that must be addressed for mashups to become to a first-class portal citizen (like user profiles, security, metadata and portlets) and guidelines to deploying mashups.
And there was more mashup talking to be done. Unfortunately, I had to come home to get ready for AjaxWorld. Which means I am missing Anthony Bradley's session on mashups tomorrow, among others. If anyone has comments on that, I'd love to hear them.
Oh, and Elvis says hi. Stop by his place if you get the chance.
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If I wanted to talk collaboration, I could wax poetic about the ways users can collaborate in the world of the enterprise mashup: tagging mashed services by type or usefulness, rating source services for quality, and even leaving wiki-like comments on the finer subtleties of services they've used.
For once, I'm not gonna. Instead, I'm going to make a rare self-serving request. But before I do that, here's your warning: the following could be construed as a shameless marketing plug.
[begin marketing stuff]
As analysts and bloggers alike continue to ponder and pontificate on the value enterprise mashups, what was once buzz is fast becoming reality. To get a collective grasp on 'what is an Enterprise Mashup' from your perspective, we've created a short survey on Enterprise Mashups.
Take a minute and fill out this [very!] short survey and and you'll receive a free copy of the Survey Results Summary. Equally important, you'll be entered in a drawing to win an iPod. The survey results will help users, vendors and analysts alike understand mashups from the perspective of the collective.
Let your voice be heard!
[Now back to our regular programming.]
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About a a year and a half ago JackBe issued a warning, ‘DIY Ajax = DOA Ajax’, that said writing your own Ajax widgets was dangerous to your health and your career. Today, with over a hundred open source and commercial Ajax toolkits and frameworks, we can safely say we were right.
As you might expect, early indications are that developers are writing (or, at least, trying to write) their own enterprise mashups following the same pattern as the do-it-yourself Ajax developers. Now that JackBe has been providing enterprise mashup solutions for the last year, we want to issue a new warning: Don’t Write your own Enterprise Mashups!
In the interest of full disclosure, I should take a moment to remind you JackBe is an Enterprise Mashup company that offers an enterprise mashup platform called Presto. More to the point, Presto has provided us with a nice portfolio of customers that see the value in enterprise mashups. And, more importantly, thought they’d be crazy to write their own enterprise mashup platform. That’s not a boast (or, at least, it’s not intended to be) but just the background from which we issue our warning.
And from this experience, we’ve developed a simple but powerful formula to help classify enterprise mashup functionality. We’ve found that it can help even laymen more effectively understand, plan, execute, and even evaluate an enterprise mashup solution for completeness. We call this the C5 Enterprise Mashup Framework.
C5 is a simple, nicely-organized capabilities checklist which defines the elements necessary to be a complete enterprise mashup platform. If an enterprise mashup software platform satisfies the 5Cs, it will likely save you hundreds if not thousands of man-hours getting your enterprise mashups to execute in a scalable and secure manner.
Because mashups are user driven, the C5 Framework highlights four user actions centered around one core security concept. The four user actions (C’s) are consume, create, customize and collaborate. The fifth “C” is a core security concept we call confidence that encapsulates enterprise security, reliability and governance requirements. The 5Cs fully defined would be:
- Consume - A user must be able to consume public and private services on demand. The minimum set of consumable SOA-style services includes: WSDL, REST, RSS and Databases.
- Create - A user must be able to create new mashups made up of consumed services and previously created mashups, preferably in a visual editor.
- Customize - A user must be able to customize (filter, for example) existing mashups and create variants which themselves become mashups. Versioning of mashups is also preferred.
- Collaborate - A user must be able to publish and share their mashups publicly and privately, also providing opinions/rating/comments on services and mashups to peers.
- Confidence - All consumption, creation, customization and collaboration must occur in a secured and governed environment that delivers enterprise-grade security (i.e. integrating with single sign-on systems), reliability, and enterprise monitoring/governance systems.
The fifth “C”, Confidence, is what truly differentiates consumer mashups from enterprise mashups. Confidence is the security and governance infrastructure established by IT that must be followed by the mashup user, even if they are doing their own mashing. (Some might call this 5th C ‘Compliance’). Business users need the same freedom as consumer-type users but must have the confidence that their organization’s trust, security and governance requirements are met.
There you have it, the C5 Enterprise Mashup Framework. A simple, powerful and effective way to checklist software vendors to determine if they in fact provide a complete Enterprise Mashup Platform. It is not a great stretch to say that the 5Cs would be difficult, at best, to create from scratch. Don't do it yourself. Equally important, make sure you have a checklist like the C5 Framework to help separate the players from the wannabes.
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