One of our sister sites, SearchNetworking.com, just published a story on how networking pros need to collaborate with people on the applications more often these days because service-oriented apps and Web 2.0 technologies put a greater and/or different strains on the network.

The article comes out of an Interop 2008 session and quotes Shankar Ramaswamy, vice president of product management at Sonoa Systems:

“Often, we start talking to customers in the application side of the house,” Ramaswamy said. “And we say: ‘Hey, we need the infrastructure guys to buy into this. Our customers are starting to recognize that this discussion has to happen outside of our technology. We are pushing it along because we are providing something that makes these people collaborate. We urge you to talk to your application people more.’ “

The piece goes on to quote others and talk about why networking pros and app dev pros need to be locked in the same room until they figure out how to work with one another. Mind you, this isn’t revelatory news. I remember writing essentially the same story after talking to users attending the 2002 NetWorld+Interop conference. John Gage declared “the network is the computer” more than 25 years ago. All SOA and Web 2.0 technologies are doing is taking the network up on the offer.

What baffles this observer of the IT industry is why we’re still having this discussion. The connection between an Internet-enabled network that can go anywhere and applications that try to combine disparate systems and data is so blatantly obvious that you’d need to disable all five of your senses to miss it. CIOs should have demanded app dev and networking get on the same page a decade ago. Instead the conversation seemingly revolves around domain pros wondering why folks in the other domain must afflict them so?

There’s no real big secret to that one. It’s because what you do and what they do are intimately tied together. SOA stands for service-oriented architecture, not service-oriented applications. A big part of that architecture is the nervous system that enables the loosely coupled, discoverable services to operate.

We spend a lot of bandwidth these days talking about technology and ROI (or the lack thereof). I’ll hazard a guess, absent any broad-based data to support it, that ROI is as much tied to getting disparate groups like app dev and networking to work with each other as it is to anything else. It gets to the simplistic beauty of Occam’s razor. Why can’t your IT department operate more efficiently? Because it doesn’t. If it did, then you’d likely see faster and bigger ROIs. Obviously levels of collaboration and dysfunction vary company to company, division to division, but far too many people aren’t having this conversation and you know who you are.

When all else fails, you might want to try working with the people with whom you work.

I’ve been having an extended conversation during this calendar year about SOA and the telecom industry, namely that the European telecoms are often the reference models for what a service-oriented business looks like while U.S. telecoms seem to be mired in the 1990s.

Today we’ve got a curious development with the announcement of the OASIS Telecom initiative, designed to help businesses in that industry embrace SOA. It’s a fine idea and somebody needs to do it, but it’s the equivalent of the short bus. I can tell you who this isn’t aimed at: companies like BT and Deutsche Telekom. They get SOA. In fact, they do it as well as anybody on the planet.

This OASIS effort is geared toward U.S. telecoms and telecoms in emerging economies. It begs the question, “How did the U.S. get lumped in with emerging economies?” We’re talking about corporate giants which apparently require extra hand holding to help them do something that has already delivered for their overseas brethren.

As I’ve been talking with analysts, vendors and users this year about the telecom services in the U.S. market, I encounter a lot of head shaking. I keep hearing that the services available in Europe put to shame what’s being offered in the U.S., which they say mostly revolves around access rather than services.

Telecom is probably the industry most worth tracking to see how early SOA adopters are able to compete and respond to market changes as opposed to service-disoriented competitors. To be fair, there are some U.S. telecom companies that have pursued big SOA projects, but I have yet to run into anyone during the last four months, where this has been a running point of curiosity for me, who hasn’t said the U.S. is lagging behind in this industry (at least in terms of modernizing services delivery capabilities), particularly as applications incorporate more Web 2.0 technologies and unified communications.

Kudos to OASIS for trying to spearhead this sort of modernization, but the real point of interest for this observer will be watching the what happens with the telecom players who took the SOA initiative and gave themselves a head start.

A lot of analysts I respect have been pushing the concept of Web-oriented architecture, or WOA, of late. For those unfamiliar with the term, Dion Hinchcliffe has covered it extensively and Dana Gardner has been singing its praises. To be honest, it looked like a term in search of a foundation to this observer. We’ve already got RIA and composite applications and mashups and Web 2.0 and SaaS and SOA, but I figured I should ask a few architects what they think of the concept to see if it’s got traction in those circles.

Granted, I only polled half a dozen people (though I’ll note here that they are half a dozen really smart people). The response I got from all of them is that WOA strikes them as redundant and nothing particularly new, an empty suit if you will. One wrote, “It reminds me a lot of the attempt by someone to gain some name recognition with the ‘SOA 2.0′ concept (which one vendor did try to use and then dropped after it was rejected by the SOA community).” Another responded, “It’s the same old thing, relabeled with an even MORE unwieldy name.”

Yet another noted, “This is just composite Web apps.”

Not a single one of them voiced a problem with the notion that Web-based development is an excellent place to concentrate your resources. In fact, some of the architects stated they are eagerly pursuing these sorts of development strategies.

That said, no one showed any love for the “WOA” acronym. “God forbid this take hold because it could complicate something the industry has been trying to simplify,” said one of the architects. He listed numerous reason why WOA, as a term, could do more harm than good:

• Users should have exactly one enterprise architecture, many don’t and they don’t need the confusion of “which architecture should I use?”
• WOA doesn’t really have an underlying architecture, it’s more a set of best practices around REST, RIA and composite apps.
• If users perceive WOA to be outside the principles of SOA, it could prove an excellent vehicle for building Web-based stovepipes.
• WOA toes and sometimes crosses the line of being technology driven. “We plan on using Google Apps, but Google Apps needs to fit into our structure, not the other way around.”

That last point about the potential technology driven nature of WOA was a point of contention for another architect. “One of the big problems we’ve had to fight is people who act as if SOA is tied to middleware or specific standards like SOAP or to a specific data format like XML. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just because you’ve got some new technology to use doesn’t mean you go back to shoddy engineering. Everyone should know better than to let a specific hot technology drive the bus. It will cool off and you still need to be in business.”

Strikeiron CEO Dave Linthicum has also blogged about the upside of WOA. He pitched WOA as a potential gateway to SOA.

What is changing quickly is that enterprises are finding that the path of least resistance is in essence to build their SOAs on the Web, using Web resources, including content, internet delivered APIs, and Web services. Once there is success with WOA you’ll see the same patterns emerging behind the firewall, or SOA.

The polled architects viewed that as a perfectly legitimate approach, but one noted, “It’s still SOA. I just don’t see where WOA adds anything. Terms like this tend to make people in the field angry. In this case, it’s an attempt to sell them something they’ve already bought. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to use REST or build composite apps using Web tools.”

Time will tell whether WOA gains traction, but these architects expressed an unequivocal desire to have no more than one something-oriented architecture in their lives.

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.

Oracle Corp. continues to pursue its agnostic approach to Web 2.0 development as its tools designed to help developers create Ajax without having to mess with JavaScript progress through beta, says Ted Farrell, chief architect and vice president for tools and middleware at Oracle.

In an interview discussing the Oracle approach to the problematic nature of JavaScript this past fall, Farrell said: “In the Ajax space, JavaScript access to portlets and data sharing is very difficult and in a lot of cases, it’s actually impossible.”

His opinion hasn’t changed. Speaking this past week about the Oracle tool development that relies on Java Server Faces (JSF) to spare coders from JavaScript, Farrell said, “We don’t want our developers programming in JavaScript, which is a pain in the neck.”

Oracle has standardized on a JavaServer Faces (JSF)-based RenderKit, which allows the developer who has learned JSF to assemble disparate components into a Web 2.0-style mashup.

Enterprise customers are looking for ways to avoid getting caught up in such complexities, so the philosophy behind the tools Oracle has in beta is to automate the rendering technologies, so developers only need to work with components and pages, he said. This approach also is designed to insulate developers from the on-going changes in underlying technologies for RIA, he said.

“As technologies change, we can change our framework but they don’t have to change their pages,” Farrell said.

He describes the Oracle RIA tools as “very WYSIWYG.” The developer designates that a page will be Ajax with Flash from Adobe Systems Inc., Farrell said, and that is all the coder needs to know about those technologies.

“You don’t have to learn those technologies,” he said, which in the case of Ajax is basically JavaScript. “Our visual editor will show you how the page is going to look. You can drag a component like a table onto the page. You can bind that to some backend databases or Web service, wherever you are getting the data from.”

Farrell said the Oracle RIA tools are in an advanced beta stage prior to the official release. Interested developers can find out more information and even download them from the Oracle Technology Network.

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.