Edward Ort's Blog

May 2006 Archives

Good Panel Discussion on AJAX, Web 2.0, and SOA

I just came back from a panel discussion titled "Java Technology, AJAX, Web 2.0, and SOA". The session brought together four pretty savvy guys in the web application and web framework world: Rod Johnson, CEO of Interface 21 and creator of the Spring Framework; Dion Hinchcliffe, co-founder and CTO of Sphere of Influence, an enterprise architecture firm; John MacDonald, a principal in Sabre Holdings (Sabre is responsible for many of the major applications in the airline travel industry); and Craig McClanahan, Senior Engineer at Sun and architect of Sun's Java Studio Creator product (McClanahan was also co-spec lead for JSF 1.1 and is the original developer of Apache Struts). The session was moderated by Deepak Alur and Dan Malks of JackBe, an AJAX solutions provider.

I thought this was a pretty good session. One refreshing thing I heard from Malks is that he and Alur conceived of the session because they were confused by a lot of the newly emerging terminology and ideas related to Web 2.0, web services, and the like. In fact, they kept a slide up during the entire session that showed many of the buzz words, like "mashup", and acroynms that architects and developers inevitably sprinkle into their talk these days. It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one confused by a lot of this.

This was a question and answer session. Some of the questions came from Alur and Malks, some from the audience. Here are some of the Q&As I found particularly interesting. Note that I can't write fast and my memory ain't what it used to be. So what I've recorded is incomplete at best and perhaps incorrect at points.

Malks: What do you think is the relevance of Web 2.0 to your business?

Hinchcliffe: What we're really seeing in Web 2.0 is the 2-way web, where people are contributing as much content as they're consuming. It's a social networking phenomenon.

McClanahan: Web 2.0 is a lot of technologies that we've had for years but that are now coming into general use.

Johnson: To me, the interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that it's finally happening. I've worked for clients like the Financial Times who moved in the late 90s to a highly interactive, highly JavaScript-driven site. But by 2000 they pushed back to a pretty static site. They were back to where they were in the early 90s. So it's good to see that the push for interactivity has returned.

Audience: What about the move to easier, lightweight frameworks?

Hinchcliffe: What we have to deal with right now is different abstractions: Java, XML, SQL, ... The move to a single abstraction such as Ruby on Rails is good.

McClanahan: We haven't matured as much on the client side as on the server side.

Malks: What is Sabre doing to open up some of it applications as web services?

MacDonald: We've made more than 60 applications available as web services. But we're finding that people are using them in unintended ways, ways that the services were never intended for. So that's exposing some problems.

Malks: Are we at the point yet where our companies can completely model their business with an object model?

Johnson: It's difficult because most business have everything. One client I work with has 43 seperate systems based on 9 radically different technologies.

Audience: What advice would you give a J2EE developer who wants to develop Web 2.0 applications?

Hinchcliffe: Design for unexpected uses.

What I Learned (and Didn't) Today About SCA

I had two initial thoughts standing in line waiting to get into the the technical session "The SOA Programming Model" (TS-3608): 1. Wow, there's a whole lot of people in this line -- who knows, maybe SOA has progressed from the "what the heck is it?" stage to the "I'm actually doing SOA-related coding" stage; and (2) Why is this session called "The SOA Programming Model"? The abstract says it's about Service Component Architecture, "an" SOA programming model, not "the" (one and only) SOA programming model.

O.K. so much for initial thoughts. What I really wanted to get out of this was a better understanding of what SCA is. The abstract for this session said that the session would cover "how the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) form the basis of a cross-language and cross-technology representation of service components and the data exchanged between those components for SOA-based applications." I translate that as "we'll tell you what SCA and it's data partner SCO are and how they fit into SOA." I don't know how or why, but somehow I'd been led to believe that SCA was somehow in competition with the architecture I envision what I think of SOA, an architecture that's built on a foundation of specific protocols and web services technologies.

What I think I learned in this session is that SCA is essentially technology agnostic. In fact the main speaker in the session, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Rob High, who's on the team working on the SCA spec with folks from BEA, Oracle, and SAP, painted a mental picture that SCA is all about building SOA at a much higher level. (Had a funny thought there -- High talking about thinking "High"er.) High said that "we tend to think about SOA as a technology. But we've got to think about it as an alignment between business goals and IT." High said that SOA is really a style of building an enterprise architecture that's derived from business design. In other words, the goal of SOA is to automate a company's business processes so that it can meet its business goals and flexibly respond to changing business goals and needs. It's not about the technologies and languages that are used to implement SOA.

So what's SCA and SOA? High did go over (too quickly for me to grasp in any real sense) some of the terminology and concepts that underlie SCA and SOA. I did pull the following definition off of one slide in High's presentation:

Service Component Architecture: A specification which describes a model for building applications and systems using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Hmmm, seems sort of circular. So I'm going with the thought that SCA is an architecture that's driven by the underlying processes of a business. One thing I did get a better insight into in this session -- something that's not really specific to SCA or SOA -- is what Web 2.0 is really about. I've yet to see a really cogent definition of what Web 2.0 is. High said that "Web 2.0 expresses a desire to enable the truly ad hoc -- the ability on the Web to do what I want and need to do without the constraints of system conformance. It's all about dynamic interaction and social networking on the Web."

There was a question and answer session at the end of the talk. High invited SCA team representatives from BEA and Oracle to join him in answering the questions. Dissapointingly (at least for someone who's hoping that people are really interested in SOA) about three fourths of the audience left before the first question was asked. My take based on the answers to some of the questions is that the SCA spec is still far from finished. Major areas still need to be addressed such as how services implemented as enterpise beans fit within the architecture. I was also a little bothered by the vagueness of some of the answers. For instance, someone asked how to identify the "real" services in a legacy application. The answer given was essentially that it's difficult and requires the use of business modeling tools and people with business expertise. Another asked about the status of BPELJ (BPEL for Java technology). The answer was that BPELJ is in whitepaper stage and no spec yet exists for it.

I guess I came away from this session with some notions about what SCA is but not really all that clear of an idea. I guess I'll have to do some research on it.

Thoughts on NetBeans Software Day

I've got to admit, I don't use NetBeans as much as I could or should. But after attending NetBeans Software Day on Monday I'm psyched. I'm going to the blackboard now and will write 100 times "I'm going to use NetBeans 5.5." I guess part of it is the infectious enthusiasm of almost 1000 "NetBeanies" (did I just invent that term?) packed into a room designed to hold hundreds fewer. I didn't hear anyone complain -- now that's a good sign. But the other (more practical) part of it is that NetBeans 5.5 (now available as a Beta release)looks very functionally rich and really, really, really easy to use.

As someone who's had to live with the clumsy coding that it takes to build a web service and a web service app, and also someone who pretty regularly looks at (pardon the expression) SOA middleware, what a relief it is to see web services built through well-designed wizards and drag and drop components, visual orchestration tools, and features that actually help you understand ridiculously complex schemas. What will they think of next?

Let me tell you, if you're an enterprise app developer, and you haven't tried NetBeans 5.5, you should. As Ludo Champenois, the web services demo presenter at NetBeans Day said, "This ain't your father's IDE."

Quotable Quotes From Java Conferences Past and Present

Sitting here in the middle of the Mohave (I work remotely from Las Vegas) I'm starting to feel the beginning of a heat swell that will ultimately climb in June into the 110s. That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to arriving at JavaOne and enjoying San Francisco's supercool breezes (O.K., it's damn cold).

Another thing I'm looking forward to is picking up interesting quotes from some of the Java "heavyweights." A few months ago I attended TheServerSide Symposium here in Vegas. Here are some of the more interesting quotes I heard:

• "Java EE will bring back a lot of disgruntled people."
• "It's quite interesting to see the technology behind AJAX really being accepted after being around for years. This will engender a whole new set of applications, and it will cause a lot of excitement."
• "We'll see a lot of focus moving back to the desktop. Sun will either significantly open access to Java or serious alternative will emerge."
• "AJAX and POJOs will make a big difference in enterprise applications."

Many of the same players who were at the TSS Symposium will also make appearances at J1. I'll keep my ears open wide and try to capture any of the more interesting things they say. If you hear a quote that sounds particularly interesting share it here.

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