John Reynolds's Blog

Big dreams on the longest night of the year...

The past year has seen a lot of progress in enterprise computing. At the beginning of this year I was writing an "elevator speech" on Service Oriented Architecture to introduce the concepts to my IT colleagues:

"This talk will be far more evangelical than technical, and I hope that it will de-mystify SOA for some. I'm sure many of you will say "Duh!" when you read some of the points, but you'd be surprised how many folks just don't get it (yet). "

The other big story of 2005 has to be AJAX (Adaptive Javascript and XML). I first blogged about AJAX in March after witnessing an amazing demo by Dion and Ben. I was wowed by the possibilities, but haunted by:

"memories of pre-custom tag JSP pages... a little puddle of HTML markup embedded in an ocean of Java code (only this time it's JavaScript)"

AJAX and Service Oriented Architectures are fond remembrances of the recent past... What about dreams for the future?

David Gelernter said the following during an interview for the Sun Developer Network:

"Huge numbers of "non-technical" people rely on computers not because they want to but because they have to. The great author and culture-critic George Orwell noted 60-odd years ago (and I noted in Mirror Worlds) that some people like playing with machines; some people don't. People who don't are just barely hanging on today. They need something far simpler, far more powerful than they've got today"

I think that SOA and AJAX are catalysts for the "far simpler future" that most people need. At first glance, you may not see the linkage, but take another look.

Web Services are what makes AJAX sexy. AJAX is what makes Web Services accessible to the masses.

As the SOA mindset takes hold, we should see an explosion of web services. As the AJAX toolsets mature, it should become incredibly simple for "power users" to craft tailored solutions from the new bounty of web services. Throw in improvements in service orchestration and choreography (BPEL for People anyone?), and I think we'll see a new generation of Renaissance Artist/Programmers.

In a recent interview, Bill Buxton offered the following scenario:

"The interesting thing is if you can throw a cell phone on a passenger seat, the phone rings, and the phone says to the stereo, "There's a call coming in. Can you turn the music down and can I borrow the speakers? And by the way, can I use the microphone embedded in the steering column?" Now you can just talk hands-free."

In Bill's example, the stereo provides an "audio output" service, the the microphone provide a "voice input" service, and the phone provides several communication and choreography services. The key is to help the "Renaissance power user" discover these services and then to help wire the services together on-the-fly. The pieces of the puzzle exist, the challenge is to make it easier to put them together.

The languages, tools, and devices that deliver this kind of power to the new Renaissance men and women are what I plan to dream of tonight...

Pleasant dreams indeed ;-)

Comments

• You make the common mistake among technical people to consider a specific technology to be the end all answer to every question in life.Your customers couldn't care less whether you used a much hyped thing like AJAX or a proven technology like Cobol, as long as it works and is easy for them to use.
  Similarly that user couldn't care less whether you used web services (which are another thing beloved by some techies but ignored by most of the real world) or not, as long as they get the business results they desire.
  Personally I wait at least a year after a hype starts to even look at the toy. Mostly the toy will have disappeared by then, saving me a lot of time to retool to the next hype. If the toy hasn't disappeared it will likely have reached a niche market I'm not interested in, again saving me time, or reached a level of maturity at which it's actually usable, again saving me time.
  I want to here thank everyone who follows every hype and act as guinney pigs :)

  Posted by: jwenting on December 21, 2005 at 12:11 AM

• Oink!! (Poor impression of a guinea pig squeeling approval) ;-)
  I don't disagree with you jwenting, the end user does not care what the specific technology is... but I do think "Renaissance Power Users" love the capability to construct a custom application that runs in their browser using services that are available via a URL.
  One implementation of the former is AJAX and one implementation of the latter is Web Services.
  I do so love to play with shiny new toys!

  --JohnR
  

  Posted by: johnreynolds on December 21, 2005 at 05:13 AM

• The pieces of the puzzle exist, the challenge is to make it easier to put them together.

  Worth to say it´s also about ubiquitous computing, not yet a hype, but something researches start to working on. The scenario Bill Buxton described is exactly the subject of my thesis.

  Alê!

  Posted by: alegomes on December 21, 2005 at 05:49 AM

• That capability has existed in the form of things like portal servers (using whatever API, the standard portlet API is not the first) for years. I'm not saying AJAX isn't nice or won't survive (I've not used it, only keeping an eye on it for the moment), just that you seem to fall into an all too common trap.
  I too like shiny new toys, but there's so many of them I have to be real careful which to choose before even entering the toystore or I won't have the resources to use all the ones I get ;)
  Merry Christmas

  Posted by: jwenting on December 22, 2005 at 03:09 AM

• Merry Christmas to you too jwenting!And Happy fill-in-the-apropriate-holiday to everyone else ;-)

  
  --JohnR

  Posted by: johnreynolds on December 22, 2005 at 05:39 AM

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