[CAnet - news] The importance of BPEL, Mashups, AJAX and SOA

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 [BPEL, Mashups, AJAX, SOA, Ruby on rails, etc are  significant because they
really represent, for the first time, programming tools for the Internet as
opposed to the computer. To date computing programming languages have a
structure that was fundamentally derived from the von Newman computer
architecture. But to better understand their potential I think a good
analogy  is to look at the concept of the electronic spreadsheet. The
electronic spreadsheet (Visicalc) revolutionized the ability to quickly
analyze numerical data.  Prior to the concept of the spreadsheet these types
of numerical analysis were done with customized computer programs developed
by programmers and not the users of the datasets themselves. In many ways
the spreadsheet is no where as efficient as a specialized computer program -
but its flexibility and ease of use more than compensated for their lack of
performance.  The same thing is happening with BPEL and mashups. They are
putting into the hands of users, as opposed to programmers, the ability to
link resources and tools together across the net in new and novel ways. We
are still at the very, early primitive development of these Internet
programming tools - and have not yet seen the first equivalent to VisiCalc -
but I am confident it will come soon. Thanks to Richard Ackerman of CISTI
for this collection of pointers] -- BSA

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/johnreynolds/

Service Oriented Mashups

What can Service Oriented Architects learn from Mashups?

I came across this quote recently:

    "What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all,
is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient
version 1 of a program with the least possible effort." Paul Graham

Paul is probably right, because his vision of what programmers will want in
a hundred years is pretty much what many of us want today... Give us tools
that let us cobble together existing services in nifty new ways that will
wow and impress our bosses and loved ones. The AJAX-enabled Google Maps
mashups are certainly hot this year, and quite probably hint at our future
if we pay close attention to the underlying catalysts:

    "We know we don't have a corner on creativity. There are creative people
all around the world, hundreds of millions of them, and they are going to
think of things to do with our basic platform that we didn't think of." Vint
Cerf 

But what does any of this mashup stuff have to do with Service Oriented
Architects? Aren't mashups just about fluffy browser stuff?

Perhaps that is true for the moment, but the climate for "business oriented"
mashups is about to get a lot more interesting...

AJAX does a fair job of cobbling services together on a web page, but what
about cobbling together services into long running processes? Tools for
orchestrating services have been around for a few years, but just as it took
Google Maps to propel XmlHttpRequest into the limelight, we haven't really
seen Service Orchestration take off yet.

Free orchestration tools like NetBeans 5.5 may just change that."




Not a lot of postings, but had a useful recent one about the new Service
Component Architecture (SCA) initiative.

http://azur.typepad.com/bpel/ http://azur.typepad.com/bpel/index.rdf

There's also a very active BPEL news blog called BPEL Bits

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/bpel/

Workflow from a Microsoft Architecture perspective is covered in

http://blogs.msdn.com/jevdemon/

"Musings on all things Oracle Application Server from architecture to BPEL."

http://www.orablogs.com/reynolds/

Althought not BPEL-specific, this is an interesting blog

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/johnreynolds/

His latest posting is on SOA and mashups.





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