ebizQ's Business Agility Watch

Apps and APIs, once the province of enterprise geeks, are very suddenly moving to front and center in the public consciousness. You can thank Apple, its iPhone, and its App Store primarily for this, but a wide variety of API mashup sites are riding the wave, and thus expanding the meaning of both 'app' and 'services. '

Looking to catch a wave of its own, while helping corporations post their in-house apps in internal Enterprise App Stores, mashup pioneer JackBe this week said that it would provide a platform for creating working site application catalogs as part of its Presto 3.0 offering.

''We are providing the ability to roll out app stores within you enterprise, '' said John Crupi, CTO at JackBe and co-author of Core J2EE Patterns. In fact, there are multiple ways tha the JackBe-configured 'app store' services can be delivered.

''You can open them up and run them in a browser, or you can put a script tag on a Web page, or push them out native parts in Sharepoint or iGoogle, '' Cupi said.

Note, all this has been enabled by advances in SOA and AJAX. "Ten years ago browsers didn't support this," said Crupi.

But it is not a free-for-all. The JackBe framework brings a lot of the capabilities that corporations need. Said Crupi, the system will register apps as it does services, ensure security, and make the services governable and mashable.

In the rush to the next big thing, it is worth recalling that the SOA movement helped make possible both the enterprise mashup and the app store. One of SOA's weak points has been lack of visibility within organizations - maybe app stores will make SOA's services delivery capabilities a bit more apparent to people in business, including the ones that write the pay roll checks.