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AJAX remains one of the hotter topics around the industry with the initial excitement now translating into actual product announcements – most recently Tibco and JackBe. A lot of these announcements are linking strongly back into the SOA space and the cynical eye might suspect some bandwagon jumping is underway – however this time I am not in the cynic’s camp.

JackBe, a company with a strong ex-Sun contingent, has announced its Presto platform
will be released in the first quarter of 2007. This will support the creation of rich clients for SOA which are “Situational Applications”. Situational Applications are applications rapidly developed to solve a specific requirement and are typically written by developers with less technical skills and more context knowledge. To put it another way according to Dan Gisolfi, a Certified IBM Executive IT Architect:

“Situational applications are a way for people with domain expertise to create applications in a very short time. Many IT shops have a backlog of small little projects that their customers want. If it takes 3 weeks to get to a project, the need is gone before the developer even starts coding. We want to give knowledge workers the tools to solve their own problems.”

You might ask what that has to do with SOA. Of course, traditional middleware had little need for interfaces except for management purposes and message repair type facilities as all the user interaction occurred within applications. While this line has been blurring for quite a long time as the EAI vendors added Business Intelligence layers – the generic need for rich client capabilities was limited and this was reflected in features provided in most middleware products.

As you move into the SOA world, you are deploying more business processes into the middleware and more of the business processing resides there. Therefore it makes sense to allow direct user interaction with this layer and using AJAX is of course a way to write these rich user-focused clients. However, JackBe has gone further by realising that simply addressing the presentation and interaction side is not sufficient. If something will be deployed into SOA, it must be capable of conforming to the SOA governance rules and being a “good SOA citizen”.

Finally, what makes their offering a platform for situational applications rather than a generic rich client platform is what they call their “Enterprise Mashup Server” which acts as a consolidation point for the various services and streams of data that will be presented to the users. Of course as the use of the word Mashup suggests, the focus is on making it easy to create new client interface/applications from the available services and data streams.

All of which is clearly of potential benefit within any SOA based enterprise. However, I have two caveats. The first is the use of the term AJAX Service Bus – I am not sure we really need to invent a new term. The second, more serious one is the claim by JackBe of creating “situational applications”, a claim echoed by Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink:

“The Presto platform is poised to take advantage of the opportunity where enterprises are looking to enable business users to compose services into SOBAs (Service-Oriented Business Applications) that implement business processes in a flexible, agile manner.”

Will this really allow business users to do it themselves? This has been the promise of all sorts of client-side software for as long as I can remember (second only to the claim that programs will be auto-generated by modeling tools!). I can see how it will make it easier and require less technical skills for developers to build these situational applications. However, based on the webcam demo I watched, I remain to be convinced that it will really allow non-developers to start work. Having said that, I haven’t seen the released software yet and so I could be wrong!

Posted by rbradley in Market trends • Product news • SOA concepts • Web2.0 |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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