Notes from AjaxWorld: Times They Are a Mashin'

Whew! What a week we just had! JackBe got a mention in a major newspaper, was at 2 conferences, participated in an industry association, and unveiled 3 major new product innovations.

In case you missed the mention in our previous post, JackBe got a small nod in The Wall Street Journal in an article titled Do-It-Yourself Software. At the very same time, we were a big sponsor of AjaxWorld. And that’s where the real interested stuff really began (particularly for you).

JackBe CTO John Crupi and Lead Architect Kishore Subramanian presented the opening session titled "Let My People Mash". John talked about the architectural aspects of enterprise mashups and discussed the C5 Framework for Enterprise Mashups. Kishore went on to do a live demonstration of one of our newest innovations, Presto Wires, browser-based visual mashup designer and composer. Wires is a bit akin to Yahoo Pipes except that it has an enterprise focus and is built on our Presto Edge mashup server.

In the Wires demo, Kishore showed how easy it was to create a mashup that invoked several third-party services, merged and filtered the results, and published the mashup as another service that can be consumed by the users. He then showed how to mashup SalesForce WSDL web services to create a mashup that encapsulates some complex micro-orchestration of multiple SalesForce services (login, query for Sales Leads) and Yahoo Geocode REST service (to obtain geocodes for each Sales lead obtained from SalesForce query). And there wasn’t a single line of code involved.

For both these scenarios, Kishore also demonstrated how easy it is to create a mini-application (we call them Mashlets) that encapsulates the mashup functionality and becomes a entity that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms like portals, websites, wikis and RIAs. All in all, we think it made for a powerful demonstration of enterprise mashups!

In a separate session, JackBe’s Chief Architect Raj Krishnamurthy and VP of Engineering Deepak Alur presented a talk entitled "The Language of Enterprise Mashups". In this session we revealed the details on yet another innovation from JackBe, our Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML), a declarative XML-based user-oriented mashup language we use in our enterprise mashup server that is exposed via Wires. We think this is the first enterprise mashup language in the industry and it is very focused towards the users needs rather than the IT developers needs.

Wires, Mashlets and the EMML are great examples of the continuous innovation in Enterprise Mashup technology that everyday brings us closer to the goal of empowering the end-user. We will post the recordings of these sessions as soon as they are available. And the Trial Download of Presto will include Wires and Mashlet functionality very soon. (We'll make sure we call those out on this blog when they go live.) In the meantime, you can check out a few pics from the event on our Flickr page. And if you were at the show, saw our stage presentations, or had a chance to stop by our booth, we would love to hear your impressions.

Now most folks would consider this a full week. But we were just getting started! Deepak also participated in the Mashup Summit on the UCSF campus and an Open Ajax Alliance discussion. . But more about those events in our next post…we need a cup of coffee first.

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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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