Pro wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper immortalized the words “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture - Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM - Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure - Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups - Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA - Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services - Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development - Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.

At its Impact 2008 event, IBM today launched a REST-based development environment called WebSphere sMash, based on its open source Project Zero. sMash supports both the PHP and Groovy scripting languages, the latter was chosen in order to “attract the Java developers,” according to Jason McGee, IBM distinguished engineer and chief architect for WebSphere sMash.

It creates a serverside runtime for RESTful services. The browser-based development tools allow for REST-based components to be exposed via Ajax with the Dojo toolkit. McGee said the goal of the project had been to create a simple, intuitive component model for developers looking to create RESTful services. There is a developer guide, which goes into the nitty-gritty on runtime management, RSS/ATOM support, REST API documention, configuring data access and dozens of other topics.

Some good news for those looking to do more with REST development is that sMash won’t be a standalone REST offering inside the Big Blue product ocean.

“We look at REST enablement as a core capability across the IBM portfolio,” said Kareem Yusuf, director of product development for WebSphere sMash. WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo made the same vow, promising that REST support will be driven across IBM’s platforms, particularly on the SOA front.

“We’re systematically going through our product line and REST-enabling everything from MQ to CICS, DB2, WebSphere Application Server and on and on. This liberates these products and the content they represent to the Web,” Cuomo said. “With all that content dangling out on the Web, programmers can now agilely write new applications by interacting with those programs.”

Using sMASH coders can mashup content and then deploy it as a Web application, he explained. Mashups developed with the Project Zero technology also lend themselves to being hosted in a Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, Cuomo said.

“So Zero as a service is the next thing on the horizon,” he added.

The scripting language support should lower the barriers to entry for developers looking to try sMash.

“It’s not a new language people have to learn,” McGee said.

A limited community version will be available through the Project Zero website and the full version, with support, will be available on a license model.

For a developer level take, check out the TSS.com discussion of the sMash release.

Joining sMash in the Web 2.0 offering mix is a new product called IBM Mashup Center, designed for non-technical line of business users. It combines Lotus Mashups technology on the front end with the InfoSphere MashupHub on the back end. Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web interaction hubs at Lotus, said the product is designed to put mashup technology in the hands of knowledge workers, enabling them to pull information out of enterprise applications (like ERP and CRM) and combine that with market data and other 3rd party applications.

“The differentiator is we know where all that information is at,” Bowden said, noting that mashup development has become a hotbed for venture capital investment.

A visual wizard tool will allow users to create RESTful services and widgets without having to know specific programming languages.

Recently we polled SearchSOA.com site members on their RIA and composite application plans. What we discovered is there’s a massive overlap between the SOA and RIA audiences.

In all we received 395 responses and 44% said rich Internet applications were part of their enterprise IT/business strategy. Another 30% reported that RIA would become part of that strategy in 2008. 85% reported that RIA was an important to extremely important piece of their SOA strategy. Only 2% said RIA wasn’t important at all to their SOA plans.
Most strikingly, 74% reported they expect the importance of RIA to their IT/business goals to increase this year. In other words, for 3/4 of our survey respondents, RIA is a big deal that will be getting bigger. Rich Web front ends were the most popular type of app being built or planned (79%), with Ajax (81%) being the most popular technology employed to build those apps. Yet 55% also reported they are building/planning database composite applications and 35% reported they have entered or will enter the fairly new space of enterprise mashups. That’s a fairly massive amount for a category that would have been in the low single digits two years ago.

Oddly, mobile apps only drew a 29% response rate. That could be read a few different ways. Our respondents were mostly senior folks in the app dev or IT department. It’s possible rich mobile development is being done outside their auspices. Yet the fact that the more senior people in the app dev arena aren’t connected to it would also mean that rich mobile development hasn’t become a major enterprise initiative. The other way to read it is that mobile devices have yet to become a major business initiative. In fact, mashups using unified communications might be the path that mobile devices take rather than strict mobile app development.

The top two benefits sought by those building out rich/composite apps were improving the user experience for customer facing apps/services (65%) and providing expected levels of business functionality to end users (61%). Lack of internal knowledge/resources ranked as the number one obstacle to adopting Web 2.0 technologies (21%). It also ranked high as a secondary issue (35%). Yet a whole host of issues fell in the 27-38% range for secondary issues: techinical readiness/back-end support, selecting the right technologies, security, data/application integration issues and application performance issues.

Finally, IT management ranked as the top evangelist (28%), technical decision maker (34%) and financial decision maker (40%) when it comes to Web 2.0 technologies. Yet an interesting person ranked second in evangelism (27%) and technical decision making (26%) - the architect. Maybe this has something to do with polling the membership of an SOA site, but it speaks to how architecture is becoming a primary concern in all applications work these days.

It should be remembered that for years analysts have been saying that a primary benefit of pursuing SOA is to get ready for whatever comes next, to be able to deploy new technologies on top of the existing IT infrastructure in a way that makes sense. It would seem from our survey that those predictions are now taking shape in reality. RIA is happening parallel to and in conjunction with SOA and it looks like many users will have interesting stories to tell later in the year.

Marketers in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world seem to be  falling all over each other to make their new products Web 2.0 buzzword compliant.

Although Web 2.0 is a dubious term technically since there is no real Web 2.0. It is a clever catchall phrase for the more glitzy browser applications that emerged originally with wikis, and blogs, as well as Podcasts, which is another buzzword for downloadable digital audio files.

A chart of Google Trends data on Web searches indicates that Web 2.0 first came on the scene in mid-2004, when SOA was already flying high as a frequently searched topic. But after sliding under the radar for the next year, Web 2.0 took off like a rocket in late 2005 and surpassed SOA in the fourth quarter of 2006. Since then Web 2.0 has been the more popular term.

So it is perhaps not surprising that marketers are hyping their Web 2.0 capabilities in product announcements.

This week in announcing OpenLibertyJ , its open sourcing of Liberty Alliance security and privacy framework the major emphasis was on Web 2.0. SOA got only one mention in passing.

Asked why the big emphasis on Web 2.0, Brett McDowell, executive director, Liberty Alliance, said: “From my perspective service-oriented architecture is a concept that immediately resonates and gives you a vision of applications if you’re an enterprise architect. Web 2.0 gives you a vision of applications that are taking the Web by storm. What we wanted to use is the term that’s going to convey the correct expectation of what this framework is meant to enable.”

But that didn’t mean OpenLibertyJ had little or nothing to do with SOA.

“It absolutely enables the identity bus for SOA,” McDowell said. “But I think a broader audience understands the vision of Web 2.0.”

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for ZapThink LLC., was asked if this explanation was more about marketing or technology.Replying by email, Bloomberg wrote: “Technically correct or marketingese? Well, both. 100% marketingese with just enough truth mixed in :-).”

The Liberty Alliance is not alone in hitching a product wagon to the Web 2.0 star. Since 2006, Oracle Corp. has been talking about the convergence of the Java Enterprise Edition and Web 2.0 into something Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s senior vice president, called SOA 2.0.  

That term does not appear to have caught on, as a request to Google Trends brought back this reply: “Your terms - SOA 2.0 - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.”

In 2007, Oracle began using the term Enterprise 2.0 for the Java, SOA and Web 2.0 convergence that is bringing wikis, blogs and social networks into the corporate world. Since first appearing on Google Trends charts in the fourth quarter of 2006, Enterprise 2.0 has been a hotter topic in Web searches than SOA 2.0. But when compared with SOA and Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is still a flat line under their arcs.

If Oracle with its marketing muscle cannot get SOA 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 off the ground, we may be stuck with Web 2.0, nebulous as it may be.

Discussing IBM’s SOA and Web 2.0 marketing strategy this week, Stephanie Martin, new worldwide lead for IBM Developer Relations, which includes more than 6 million coders who frequent the developerWorks Website, says she believes the two terms can play well together.

“They’re both very hot topics in the market right now,” Martin said. “In order to have the Web 2.0 experience, SOA is critical for designing and architecting these applications. That’s where I see the link between SOA and Web 2.0. Certainly they are not the same thing. SOA is the enabler of Web 2.0 but I do not see one replacing the other. We’re seeing our community’s interest in both those technologies growing consistently.”

So it appears SOA and Web 2.0 will have to co-exist as buzzwords, at least, until the next hot term is coined.
 

Web 2.0 and enterprise mashups were the hot topics at this year’s Web Services/SOA on Wall St. conference. Michael Ogrinz, principal architect for global markets at Bank of America, revealed his company was heavily pushing the mashup concept to its internal users. He argued mashups are a way to overcome low user expectations that the Internet can become a dynamic, useful tool in getting their jobs done.

He also said end user IT departments ought to get involved in mashup development.

“The reason you see the emergence of these mashup vendors is IT has failed to provide the service,” he said.

That’s an interesting take, that vendors are rushing in where users haven’t dared to tread. The panel on which Ogrinz sat lauded mashups for their do-it-yourself nature and expressed hope that more companies would catch the DIY spirit.

Jonathan Rochelle, a senior product manager with Google, stated that mashups not only stand to get corporate employees to avail themselves of powerful modern tools, but he also said, “The concept that mashups will be there is what drives the architecture.” Essentially, his point was that compelling new applications are what makes all that architectural rigor worth the while.

Always ready with a good analogy, Miko Matsumura. vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG, broached the same topic as Rochelle, saying “Mashups are sexual reproduction for your apps.”

Well, that sure does sound like more fun than we’re used to in the IT business, but Matsumura was driving at something more biological, specifically “How does evolution produce variation?” He noted that humans share something on the order of 95% of their DNA with chimps. Similarly, most applications will share the same architecture (once you get a solid architecture in place). From there, variation can take place.

As Matsumura explained it, “You’re looking to enable an infinite number of things you can do in business, but a finite number of things your IT people have to do.”

That sounds like a solid plan, Web 2.0 evolution on top of an enterprise grade SOA. Yet, as Marc Adler, senior vice president of equities and head of complex event processing at Citigroup, noted, data services have a sizable role to play in that enterprise grade SOA and it has been tough to bring DBAs into the fold.

“They kick, they scream, they holler, they don’t want to let their data out,” Adler said.

He suggested a carrot and stick approach to bring the DBAs on board. The carrot is that by opening up their databases, DBAs stand to elevate their status inside the organization. The stick is having executive’s mandate the change.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft has placed a $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo!.

We’ll leave it to others to ponder the Wall St. implications of the move, but in her All about Microsoft blog, Mary Jo Foley posits “a Yahoo! purchase would irrevocably change the kind of company Microsoft is.” Foley focuses on advertising in her comments, but it could represent a change in Microsoft’s application development focus. Microsoft built itself around operating systems and desktop applications, the things you do with a computer. Of course, with the advent of the Internet, what you do with a computer has changed radically. Yahoo! and Google have made hay in offering up Web-based applications, leveraging search capabilities and creating dynamic user portals.

Microsoft has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to gain a dominant position in those arenas. While Dana Gardner speculates a Microsoft-Google partnership might be a mess, it could represent a return to Microsoft’s core applications business. Yahoo! and Silverlight (for RIA and composite apps) represent where the next wave of applications are headed. On the enterprise side, easily distributed Web apps and multimedia mashups are where a lot of companies want to go. It’s where the innovation is and for Microsoft, a company which has always fancied itself an innovator, that’s a good place to be. There are those who think enterprise mashups will be the killer app once users get a service-oriented architecture in place, the idea being that a loosely coupled infrastructure will lead to dynamic new applications.

It’s no secret Microsoft has long faced criticism in SOA circles because its remedy for users grappling with a heterogeneous application environment has been to pursue homogeneity on the .NET platform. Microsoft’s Oslo model-driven development initiative is still in the planning stages, but a Yahoo! purchase begs the question “Why bother with application infrastructure?” Obviously no one expects Microsoft to pull its irons completely out of that fire, but if that’s not going to be a big growth area for the good folks in Redmond (and IBM and Oracle/BEA are gobbling up large chunks of that pie) then maybe it makes more sense to concentrate on New Wave application development. Microsoft could make leveraging service orientation its app dev enterprise play rather than implementing service orientation.

Let someone else do the tedious work and be the company that does the cool stuff.

There’s so many facets to this offer that it’s impossible to assess the true implications of a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger, but going after Yahoo! does indicate where Redmond’s heart is. If Microsoft really wanted to pursue application infrastructure, BEA Systems was a completely complimentary acquisition target. It would have given Microsoft unparalled reach across the .NET and Java platforms. Yet it didn’t make that play. Instead it’s made a Web play which could build on top of of what the application infrastructure vendors provide, potentially expanding its enterprise app dev audience well beyond the .NET platform.