The adventures of Coccobill

Last week, the ebizQ site posted a forum discussion on the subject “Why Hasn’t BPM Taken Off Like ERP or CRM?”. Hre is the reply I posted in the forum.

When we work we actually execute one (or more) of the "business processes" of our company. I think that "business processes" are, actually, part of the plumbing of each enterprise. At a point that, sometimes, it is "hard" to describe it because we sort of "live it".
So, in that matter, BPM should be the obvious fit.

The fact that it is has been "hard" to introduce it in the enterprises makes me thinking to the following:

1. A business process which is not documented gives the possibility to be "adapted" more rapidly. Actually, a pre-requisite for adopting BPM will be to document what needs to be automated and managed
   So, the perception may be that the company would be “more agile” if something could be changed without running into a big Change Management process.
   One could, also, think that something that is “not documented” may not be accountable also…. but this may certainly be the “bad guy” who speaks in my head…
2. A significant business process often spans several domains.
   Formally describing it may introduce negotiation issues across departments and may imply some organizational changes.
3. Once a process is described and ready to be deployed, an owner will likely be required.
   The owner may not be clearly identified yet and this may require some further negotiation. And may imply,once again, some organizational changes…
4. As Nicholas Carr was saying in his book “The Big Switch”, it is easier today for companies to adapt themselves to the business processes embedded in the CRM and ERP tools they buy instead of investing time to describe and negotiate company specific business processes….

This said, I think that the maturity of the market and the maturity of the products are now helping a lot in the adoption.

I read the Google announcement around the new Google Chrome OS.
I immediately went back to my article Enter the “Reign of RIA 3rd”. In that article I expressed my enthusiasm for the new Google browser as I saw, in the way it was announced, the principle for something new, a platform where applications delivered over the web can be executed fast, securely and offline…Chrome becomes a container for applications delivered over the web!
I rememberI concluded that long post saying:

Chrome, which could be the last browser but, perhaps, the first element of a different kind

I think that I missed something that, now, seems so obvious. I thought to Chrome as, mainly, a new RIA platform. Something beyond the traditional browser but still in the domain of a container.
What this announcement tells us is that Google went far beyond. Chrome becomes the OS, not just a container.

And not “just a new kind of OS”, but as the official announcement says, “the web is the platform”.
Ehi, this is exactly the first principle in Tim O’Reilly famous definition of what is Web2.0 !

The border between an OS and the “web as a platform” is blurring. Not only on the Internet infrastructure. It is blurring deep right onto the desktop. The Browser becoming the Operating System and the Operating System becoming an extension of the web platform itself. So, Chrome OS may be much more revolutionary than it appears. It is not simply Google attacking Microsoft on the OS battlefield. It is extending the cloud to the border.
The new Chrome OS may become the real incarnation of that principle. The operating system for the Cloud Generation. Where Web2.0, SOA and Cloud Computing meet and could shape something, this time, very different!

I received a couple of wake-up alerts from some friends about the noise that Anne Thomas Manes article “SOA is Dead; Long Live Services” has made. The result of this noise has been: “Since SOA is Dead, what are we going to do next?“.

When better reading the article, though, what I think Anne actually wrote was that the need for a Service Oriented Architecture is here and well alive. What has to be revised is, probably, the hype around the all-powerful-magic-acronym, i.e. SOA.

I think the main point that Anne makes is that SOA has an interest if it is part of a real transformation, that goes beyond the tools or the IT projects or the tools themselves. This seems to be confirmed by the following quote from Anne’s post:

Business people no longer believe that SOA will deliver spectacular benefits…

…Successful SOA (i.e., application re-architecture) requires disruption to the status quo. SOA is not simply a matter of deploying new technology and building service interfaces to existing applications; it requires redesign of the application portfolio. And it requires a massive shift in the way IT operates. The small select group of organizations that has seen spectacular gains from SOA did so by treating it as an agent of transformation. In each of these success stories, SOA was just one aspect of the transformation effort. And here’s the secret to success: SOA needs to be part of something bigger. If it isn’t, then you need to ask yourself why you’ve been doing it.

The latest shiny new technology will not make things better. Incremental integration projects will not lead to significantly reduced costs and increased agility. If you want spectacular gains, then you need to make a spectacular commitment to change.

I think we experiment this with many of our customers (and, by the way, not only in the domain of SOA….). We are all caught in the spiral of delivering results before we even start working. The ROI is calculated on a quarter-based scale which prevents, so often, from engaging in transformations that could span the next one or two quarters timeframe.
Howard, vice president and service director for Burton Group, expressed last summer a similar concept:

Business executives often conclude that IT pros exaggerate predictions of reusability or underestimate project cost, Howard said. IT professionals are generally bad at presenting the business case for SOA, and need to get better at explaining the long-term benefits in cost and flexibility to CEOs, he said. This is difficult, given that businesses tend to focus on immediate rather than long-term cost savings, and point solutions rather than strategic goals…
..”We can spend a lot of time and energy making all this shared stuff that makes IT more efficient, but it doesn’t solve business problems,” …
..A good SOA project requires leadership from a C-level executive who can spur changes in a company’s culture,…We need to get better at trusting each other as human beings. None of this is really about technology,”
The problem’s not technology: people and processes are at the heart of what’s wrong with SOA as it currently exists in enterprises.

So, the problem comes back to the cultural shift that is required. Anne continues

Although the word ‘SOA’ is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever…
…SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article, “Two Faces of the same coin”, in which I started to develop the concept that the “Process Factor” is actually at the heart of the SOA game. What I think is that the difficulty to push a BPM-based approach resides in the lack of this cultural shift, which manifests itself in the difficulty of an organization to put itself under discussion and to reconsider the way in which internal power is distributed.  One of the evidences of this is that it is easier to push for a “messaging-based” integration instead than a “BPM-based” integration. The reason, in my opinion, is that when a “messaging-based” approach is pushed, no change in the internal power distribution is required. On the other hand, a BPM approach implies that someone clearly identifies a process and that someone is clearly appointed to “manage such process”. Even in an “undocumented process” already exists in the organization, the very fact that it is “formally defined” scrambles the power positions. And this is something that people do not accept very openly.

In this sense, I agree with what Anne wrote. The tools or the projects (especially if they are big) by themselves are not able to promote the change that is required. If SOA means flexibility, it needs to go hand-in-hand with a flexible organization, one that is willing to adapt.

This evening, on the French Radio, I heard about this site: http://www.bonartisan.com

This site implements a strong reputation system which allows individuals to find craftsmen to deal with the issues that any home-owner encounters each day.

Individuals “vote” for the craftsman who just did some reparation at home. And everybody else can choose craftsmen based on the viral marketing that is generated.

Of course, nothing new in principle….
But I liked this implementation of Social Networking to this aspect of our daily life.

Very interesting article, “The Struggle for the Soul of the Web” !
The author enforces the concept of the importance of Ajax standards (and, thus, the Open Ajax Alliance) as a mean to avoid that the web becomes the territory where proprietary solutions (see Flex and SilverLight) will flourish.

In developping his argument, on which I agree, the author makes an interesting statement:
More importantly, Flash and Silverlight work by installing a proprietary plug-in to your browser, thus opting out of the entire browser infrastructure. If you are a plug-in vendor, your incentive is to keep the browser as dumb as possible.
The worse the underlying browser is at rendering rich widgets and media, the more developers and users will want your plug-in. If you are both the vendor of a browser (say IE) as well as the proponent of a plug-in (say Silverlight), then the incentives get truly twisted.

In some way, what he says is very similar to what I have said since a while: we need a new generation of Browsers which are not constraining people from developping applications delivered through the web (see here and here and here for a summary of my opinion on this topic). In that sense, Chrome may be the start of an answer (unfortunately, I say, as it comes from Google instead than from the Open Source community…).
If we want to avoid the risk that Flex and Silverlight will dominate the Web, we need to address this kind of question, which can be summarized by what I found in this other article

We’re in a transition point between the Age of Web Apps and the Age of RIAs (in the web space, that is). And if you doubt that we’re at this transition point, or if you think that RIAs include web apps, ask yourself, does AJAX really give you “all the rich you need”?

Can AJAX really, as Jef Raskin famously stated [60], treat all user input as sacred? Is AJAX really the end all and be all of a Compelling User Experience? Or do we remember that applications used to run outside of a browser?

Of course, it is provoking. But the risk is quite present.

So, here it is, the long awaited “Google Browser” (called Google Chrome, but the site should go online only tomorrow) has been unveiled in an unconventional announcement in the guise of a comic book.

For the moment, I hold any new comment. I read my old post (from last August). Let’s see if this move will actually make the battleground more free ( by removing the artificial obstacles that an evolution of the Browser technology found because of the war between IE and Firefox) or it will simply be a vehicle by which Google will transform its “presents” (GMail, GCalendar, G<something else>…) into “de-facto” standards.

The initial announcements explicitly thanks what Firefox and Apple Safari did and, more important, commits Google to open-source the innovations that are certainly present in the new Browser.

I suggest people to start reading this post from John Paczkowski, especially what he says at the end:

with its view of the Web as a Web of applications and its multi-process/multi-application design, Chrome almost seems more an operating system than a browser, doesn’t it? Funny, isn’t it. Google’s long been rumored to have been developing a browser and an OS. Who would have known they’d be the same thing ?.

Without having seen and tried yet the Google Chrome browser, I tend to agree with John on the fact that Google is probably shooting towards something that is more an RIA platform than a simple browser.

I would only ask a question. Given the “open source” nature of Firefox, why Google deployed another open-source initiative instead of joining the forces around Firefox ?

Let see when we will better understand how Google Browser is done.

I am slowly catching up with some articles I read and over which I wanted to comment. I am dealing with this one SOA needs RIA – Burton Group, because there are few sentences I liked and because it lacks, in my opinion, a proper “end”.

So, here are the quotes I liked most:

• “We firmly believe the user experience needs to be a first level priority at the same level as SDLC, platform languages, SOA and security.”
• “If the business depends on people and people depend on information technology, then the interface between people and information technology — the user interface — naturally has to be very good. If you have an ineffective user interface, you’re going to have a less effective organization.”
• “…people are the platform. IT is ephemeral. It continues to change over time, but what does not change in business is that the quality of any organization depends on the quality of its workers.”
• If developers think the goal of SOA is to provide agility in assembling loosely coupled Web services into an application that provides real-time sales data to managers and marketers, they are missing a key component in the Burton view:  “The idea is to make user experience the end goal of any IT initiative and not an afterthought.”

I, personally, subscribe to all the above statements. They remember me a very nice article I read a couple of years ago, from Dion Hinchcliffe, titled The Web2.0 Trinity: People, Data and Great Software. The pictures in this post are both taken from Dion’s article, and I use them consistently in my talks around Web2.0 and the evolution of Desktop technologies.

Going forward, there is another quote that my few readers may appreciate:

“We see the next step as RIAD, the rich Internet application desktop. Here you need to look at Adobe AIR, Google Gadgets, the Microsoft Widget Library, to see resident applications that provide you with a visual experience associated with RIA.”

This is even more close to what I have often written in my blog: moving beyond the browser (as we see it today) towards a mechanism where applications, delivered via the web, will be executed locally. GREAT !

What seems missing to me is the very last part of the article

In Burton’s view, the future of the UXP is in using Web widgets, portable chunks of code and gadgets, miniature objects that can be placed on a Web page to provide dynamic content.

With widgets and gadgets, real-time sales data is on the sales manager’s desktop without requiring him to do multiple click-throughs to find a table or chart, the Burton analyst said.

What I think is missing is the name to this approach, a name which already exists. It is called Mashups, isn’t it? What is needed is the possibility to define those widgets in a standard way and be able to mix and match them in different contexts: a Portal, a Mashup environment, a Rich Client, the desktop even….

Today I received on of the newsletter to which I subscribe. I read it because of an article which seemed to be very interesting “Oracle says Weblogic is its future strategic server”.
In the beginning, I liked this assertion “To many, the Oracle products seemed a mere adjunct to its data base”. Great! I like it!

The author, then, references the article Oracle re-brands BEA WebLogic as its strategic server for SOA. In this article, there is an even better quote, from Bloomberg:

“If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice’, what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody”.

I read this quote from Lombardi‘s president Phil Gilbert. I think it deserves a post:

“BPM is the scalable program by which a company develops and maintains a capability for change. By “capability for change” I mean: having a corporate culture that will actively embrace change, without fear, and work to make that change good. Today, most cultures actively reject change, until forced by market conditions into it. And while companies are finding that the technologies of a BPMS ((roughly characterized as model-based design, business rules, business intelligence, business activity monitoring, and workflow) help, they don’t solve the cultural problem of people embracing change. The maturity of today’s BPMSs… may reduce the development time of a process application from, say, 90 days to 89 days. But it still takes months for a business case to get approved to charter the project. It still takes weeks to roll-out the new application. It still takes a year to get budget. “

Whilst the software products are geared towards making people executing things in a more effective way and allowing people to execute things that were not possible before (I agree, this is not always something good… we would live better without some of the software creatures…), I have always thought that the goal of the technology behind the software results (i.e. the technology that allows the production of software) would be to allow the artists (i.e. the developers) to do their job in the best possible conditions.

I remember how much I loved the VMS operating system (from Digital), the powerful CASE environment that was implemented on that operating systems (ah, Language Sensitive Editor…) and the Common Language Runtime.
I also remember how easy and natural it was, a life later, to develop distributed Service Oriented applications in the Forté environment (where Service Orientation and scalability was built inside the language framework itself). The motto from Forté was “Hiding the Complexity” and, indeed believe me, they couldn’t have been chosen a better motto!

Today I have read one of the “2008 predictions articles” and I was hit by the last item:

13. The next big thing. Software development will change to a wider use of code generators. Forget about heavy frameworks, regardless of what programming language you use.  In a simple case, use some XML style sheets combined with the metadata that describes your application objects to automatically generate the code for these objects. On a larger scale, the entire application may be described using metadata and XML, and an appropriate code generator will do the job. So programming will change from writing tedious code that requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom code generators.

I know, this will remain a dream: Why steal the pleasure of fighting against the complexity of building a program that would let the author being proud of the many hours he spent in debugging it and in having a presentation that looks likee what he would have wanted ….?

Hiding the complexity and allowing the artist to express his creativity in addressing the solution to a problem (instead than in debugging, in challenging multithreading or fighting against the geometry manager) would be something nice to dream.

P.S.The Author has, also, some interesting observation on Java, AJAX and Flex/AIR.

Of course, this is NOT the official cover for the POY of Times. But it is a very interesting story (thanks Dvir for having sent the pointer). Quoting the article from Times:

"Don’t get me wrong: all the things that made You You in 2006 are still there. All year long, You were YouTubing, Facebooking, Twittering, chronicling Your life and community, scrutinizing the candidates and the media, videotaping Yourself getting upset on behalf of Britney Spears.

But who made the big noise in the Web 2.0 world this year? It was Them. The professionals, the old-media people, the moneymen — all of Them, conscious that there was profit in Your little labor-of-love socialist paradise. Story of Your life, right? You make the discoveries, They make the Benjamins.

So if 2006 was the year of You, 2007 was the year of Them. Big media companies (like this one) stuffed their sites with blogs, podcasts and video. "

This is, actually, true. And I think that, overall, this has been a good progress for everybody.

I thought I would share another couple of sentences I read in a book have very much liked. The book is another masterpiece, The Tipping Point. In the afterword there is a little chapter, titled "Beware the Rise of Immunity". The following are excerpts from there:

The fact that anyone can e-mail us for free, if they have our address, means that people frequently and persistently e-mail us. But that quickly creates immunity, and simply makes us value face-to-face communications – and the communications of those we already know and trust – all the more.

When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen.

During this period I am seeing many posts around "Resolutions for the New Year" which explicitly state that inbox-zero is one of the priorities. So, we could say that

The proper use of Social Software can actually be the cure for immunity. 

And Lotus Connections can actually provide a big help in looking for Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen inside your community.

So, I had been late on commenting on other attempts of the big octopus, but I cannot refrain from commenting on this.

Google officially announced a Wikipedia killer: it is called KNOL. Under the seducing title of Encouraging people to contribute knowledge, Google is, actually, directly attacking Wikipedia.

I have never been a big fans of Wikipedia, also. 
I just think Wikipedia is useful and is something that is important in the panorama of the Web; but I still think that I prefer to know who is providing me the information. As I often say, I try to teach my children not to get the free press, because behind the fact that they do not spend money for getting it, some hidden messages can be delivered. And I am using this same argument in my posts against Googlesaurus…

Now, KNOL actually proposes something that I consider interesting and, in principle, more robust and accountable than Wikipedia:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors… We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content…

…We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information.

A way in which people will sign what they write; a system where there will be competing opinions. And where people can comment on something that has a signature. I like this!

But:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content…

…At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads…

…Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.

Ok. Once again, behind the seducing sentences of “We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge” or “Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine“, the Googlesaurus shows its aspect and its intention: Wikipedia is out of its control and is, potentially, an incredible source of revenue! It cannot be left there as it is, like an unexploited goldmine.

And, once again, a Big Brother (Google Search Quality) will rank for you what you better read as your primary source of information.

Sorry. The idea is good, but it will turn to be another arrow that will make Google more powerful and, all of us, less free.

I think that some parts of the Internet will need some control. Leaving control to Google is not good. Leaving control to other may not also.

Let’s say NO TO GOOGLE and to its enormous ego! Internet search is too important to be left in the hands of a private company.

P.S.See the Read/WriteWeb article for more information

Yesterday I saw the movie “The Devil wears Prada“.

You remember when Miranda asks for the yet-to-be-published copy of Harry Potter?
The way in which Andy manages the situation, by delivering two copies of the book to the twins before they take the train and giving an additional copy to Miranda, anticipating her objection and exceeding her expectation, is so great that I could not resist from immediately thinking to a sentence that I often use in my presentations for Lotus Connections or Web 2.0:

It’s not what work you expect Employee #1234 to accomplish per person-month of work……
It’s the work you never expected would happen, that suddenly creates new business

I hope that no one has to do impossible things in order to really create a new opportunity, but the example was so sharp and sticky !
It really, I think, makes it clear that it is important, today, to be innovative and clever in whichever action we do, in order to apply the passion that is inside us.

Yesterday, on my way back from Paris where I got a wonderful long week end with my wife, I was reading these sentences from the book “The Tipping Point“:

In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity….
We’re friens with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.

I remembered those sentences when, this morning, a colleague sent me an email pointing me to this site: SAGA Zone.
It is a social site for people over 50. Hey, next year I can subscribe to it! There is also an interesting article that explains what the site is for.

Communities are springing everywhere, now that the new synthetic universe is giving the possibility for people to share. The proximity, the possibility to occupy the same space is no more limited by the typical dimensions where we live (space, time). The new universe gives the possibility to “do things together” with people that “live down the hall“…

There is, though, a sad side of this story, in my opinion; it is the sense of loneliness that these initiatives bring together. Apparently, it is more and more difficult to have normal relationships with other humans.
Don’t get me wrong. Technology is opening new frontiers that are certainly enhancing our “social attitude”. It should be “enhancing”, though, more than “substituting”. At least, this is what I would think of myself in the 3rd age…

I have been surprised when I read this article: James Gosling (Sun) : « Java sur le poste client n’est pas à la hauteur aujourd’hui ». It is in French, so I translate the title here:

• Open Source applications, the most popular of which is probably the Azureus BitTorrent client
• Commercial applications also, of course !

And, not least, IBM is building the new generation of its products based on Eclipse RCP!

The Universal Managed Client for SOA, called Lotus Expeditor. A platform for building enterprise applications and enterprise mashups that bring the power of SOA towards the desktop and devices

The new Lotus Notes 8 client, which brings the possibility of building Composite Applications centered around the collaboration tools

Lotus Sametime, which provides a new frontier for Unified Collaboration and Communication

Sun may not be ready. But the world is not waiting in order to make Java evolving! And Java is bigger than a trade symbol.

Thanks to an IBM internal comment, I discovered the Did you know 2.0 video referenced by Luis in his Reminder of How Much Things Are Changing post.

I have one reaction: frightening. I am scared! I mean, of course the flow of things cannot be reversed, the earth spins from West to East regardless of my opinion (or of the collective opinion thereof…). But there is a difference between acknowledging that something is happening and not doing anything to oppose, right?
I mean, not everything that happens is “a good thing”, in my opinion. We have the right, as human beings, to oppose to things that may not go in the direction we like.

I list here few things I definitely do not like:

• B.G. : Before Google ????
  Could not believe it!!! There was an era before Google and an era after….
  It is not that I could not believe it. This is a fact. No one can contradict this evidence. But, once spelled in that way, I think it also becomes relevant the question: “if Internet search is SO important and pervasive, could we really afford to leave it in the hands of a single private monopoly?”.

• “Today’s learners will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38.“
  I am not the person who was born in IBM; I just joined 5 years ago (yeah, I am in one of the other statistics) and have been with other 3 companies before in 25 years of work.
  But 10-14 jobs by the age of 38 means that people may change jobs as frequently as each year or 18 months. Is this what companies expect in terms of loyalty from employees? Isn’t it true that people start being really productive once they know the context and the culture of the company they work for? Does this mean we will all have “contractor jobs“, jobs based on a single task to be executed?
• “Half of what a student in a 4-years course studies will be outdated starting when starting his 3rd year.“
  Ehi. Culture is not only technology that gets outdated as new inventions happen.
  I think that children and adolescents have the right to study things that will not be directly part of their CV. It is the only moment in life in which they can learn things “just for thesake of learning”, “just to shape their minds and their hearts”, “just to discover what the history has sedimented in thousands of years”.
  We will always have the time to play with the last innovation… but we will not have so much time to read Shakespeare, to learn how to love poetry, to understand how humankind got here where we are.
  Sedimentation of understanding is an important principle that we need to keep in mind. Reading, remembering… and understanding (in order to have culture permeating our lives) are still different processes in our brain, I think (at least they are in mine).
• “Young people Urgently need new skills to succeed in the global economy“.
  Learning new skills is something that has been true always, I guess. The evolution of mankind just did not start yesterday…
  The accent here, though, is on the urgency. Like “we urgently need to eat”…. Urgently!
  Urgently….
  I commented on the pace of this urgency a couple of days ago…
  And the other accent is on the “global economy”. As a big a Godzilla from which we have to defend ourselves… Or as the climate changes that will subvert the needs pyramid and change the way in which we face day-to-day life.
  Looks really like a science-fiction movie, where it seems we are starting to fear about what we are producing but we are already unable to control it.

I cannot consider that all this is unavoidable. I cannot think that we do not have a mean to adapt the pace to our biological rhythm, to the way in which our minds have been shaped and our heart loves.

Yesterday the big day arrived. The Airbus A380 first shipment happened.

I cannot say if this will change the way in which civil aviation will be in the future.

But, certainly, it is the achievement of an exceptional technical challenge that the European industry took. Successful or not, it is certainly remarkable and important.

I am proud to be European today. Sometimes we are not simply followers but we keep our spirit and soul for invention and over-achievement.

I read a commentary around the recent Gartner 10 Strategic technologies to watch in 2008.
In this commentary, Evan Data Corp. Joe McKendrick and Software AG Miko Matsumura say, very high, that even in SOA is not explicitely spelled in the recent Gartner’s report, SOA itself is the basis for what we are building today and in the future. There are some interesting quotes from the commentary that I wanted to highlight here, as they have really a lot to do with what we do everyday.

• The consumption patterns of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are made possible by SOA in this view.
  “The architecture has no value until it’s expressed in consumptions patterns. …The underlying service is just a generic-kind of service, but it comes to life when you put an Ajax interface in front or some kind of cool mashup in front of it. Once you’ve got a platform of business services, you can make mashups or Web 2.0 or a ton of really cool things.

• “Turning to another goodies metaphor, …SOA is invisible in the same way the recipe for a cake is invisible. Even the most proud baker wouldn’t stop people from eating his cake while he read them the recipe. The consumers of cake or Web 2.0 applications want to enjoy them not hear a dissertation on how they were made, he said.
• The status of SOA today is similar to where e-commerce was in the late 1990s. At that time everybody was building e-commerce applications using e-commerce tools. “Now, we’re doing the same thing with SOA. We’re saying this is an SOA project or this is an SOA tool. Today, you still use content management and application servers and Java as a language and Web interfaces, but you no longer call it e-commerce because now it’s just apps. It’s just how we do it. We don’t really think of it as e-commerce any more, it’s just the typical pattern for applications these days. I think exactly the same thing will happen with SOA.”
• “When you say SOA no longer matters, it’s everything that SOA enables that matters, I totally think that’s right because SOA is a way to achieve certain things from an architecture and an alignment and agility point of view,”

I like all these quotes, because they really make the point!

Going back to what Gartner asserts, I obviously like the presence of the following 3 items in the top-ten list:

1. Business Process Modelling
2. Mashups and Composite Applications
3. Web Platform and WOA

My readers know how much I consider “Business Process Modelling”, at the point that I did not hesitate to say that it is the glorification of any SOA, the way in which Services could become useful from a Business Point of view. I am not sure, though, that BPM will emerge (finally!!!). Not because it should not deserver a shining place, but because of the power implications it brings into a company’s organization (who owns the process owns the power….).

In this context, though, the emergence of the Mashups and Composite Applications, may slightly change the picture. “They allow you to rapidly tailor the functionality you want in one place, without having to re-create the original“  is the quote from Gartner. I still think what I wrote last year in “Composite Applications, Mashups and Portals: relay race or team spirit?” . Through Mashups and Composite Applications, the user will become an actor in the SOA. SOA will not stop anymore at the beginning of the HTTP pipe on the server…. it will continue, it will encompass the desktop.

The user will be allowed to integrate what the “portal” gives him with tools and content coming from elsewhere. The “portal” will provide the official company process and the mashup will provide the creativity, the differentiator by which a user would tailor the standard process and add his own touch !

I happened to read the article Le système biométrique de Microsoft piraté avec de la pâte à fixe ?. It is in French, so I provide here a quick Babelfish translation of the orginal content (I changed few little words from the automatic translation):

Exclusive: French students succeed in circumventing the biometric system of Microsoft, the FingerPrint readers… with adhesive paste!
Two students found a very original means of circumventing the security system of FingerPrint readers of Microsoft. With this intention, they employed candle’s wax and adhesive paste of a very known mark. “With the means of we had we managed to circumvent a system which probably cost million dollars of development”. Most worrying is the easiness to bypass this biometric control. They moulded a print in candle’s wax, used adhesive paste to get the positive and the game is there as a video posted on DailyMotion shows. “Our next idea is the recovery of fingerprints on glass and the exploitation of those”.

Of course, breaking security is illegal. I do not want here to spread some illegal information.
Also, having weak, breakable security systems is not a privilege of Microsoft only….

But, it is fun anyway! I mean, you invest a lot of money in securing something that your children could compromise so easily….

I could not believe it when I read Jonathan Schwartz‘s (Sun CEO and President) recent post about changing the trade name for Sun Microsystems from SUNW to JAVA.
I hear that most of the comments are hostile to this. Some of them loose even time in going in the semantic of associating the slowness of Java to a rapidly declining company.
There is some summary of the most interesting entries in Sam Ruby‘s blog.

What I think of this story it is that it is just another example of abusing of addiction (see my post on gBrowser here).

• If Java is what Java proponents always say “an open technology”, how could it become the identifier of a private company?
  This is a great mistake in my opinions. It will benefit the ones who oppose Java, such as Microsoft…
• this move shows no respect for all the companies (and individuals) that built the success of Java.
  Java did not become widely used for anything that Sun did. Sun’s Java products are trailing everywhere and their marketshare is far from being predominant.
  The success of Java was built by the IBM and Oracle and BEA and Open Source….
• Given this, I fear (or hope) that this move could lead to a diaspora on Java, where at this point everybody will feel free to abandon the Logo and to perfect (wow…) the platform according to its own customer needs.

So, it is very sad to see someone counting on the popularity and addiction on something … to steal the attention of the community and impose himself as the gatekeeper (or keymaster… both of them were no so nice characters in Ghostbusters, right?).

Having a pony-tail does not equate to have all the rights!

I have read this morning an article speculating on the arrival of a new Browser on the market, a Browser labelled “Google” (or Gbrowser).
The few readers of my blog can immediately imagine that this is not the kind of news that I would have liked to hear. I personally do not like this invasion of things from Google which, under the cover of being “free for everybody”, tie us to a new monopoly (see my previous post “Internet Search should be property of no one“).
I state this even if I have no problem admitting that most of the technologies that Google, in its immense altruism, offers us are very cool and really innovative and really pushing for significant progress in the Web space.
The problem is not around how cool the presents from Google are… it is about the concept of “present” itself !

Anyway, in this specific case (GBrowser… yes, you can see that the domain name has already been registered by Google!) I think that, if the speculation actually reflects a reality, it may become something very significant, and perhaps not completely bad.

If really Google will put on the market its own branded Browser, I think that :

1. Google will finally admit that some “footprint” is required in order to properly run today’s internet applications (this will have consequences on AJAX as we see it today, I think)
2. Google will automatically transform what they published as “contribution” into a de-facto standard (because it will be working naturally with the new browser….)
3. Google will create a platform onto which developers will build RIA applications

Yes, in the last bullet I wrote “RIA applications“. Because, if the Browser from Google will become true, it will obviously promote the use of Google Gears and of all the other G* things that invaded the web. A couple of months ago, I wrote my first reaction to Google Gears:

“[with Google Gears] Google starts to install something else than the browser in order to keep the browser relevant”

The advent of Apollo AIR (paved by Flex) and the approaching of Vista (via Silverlight) may create serious alternatives for running applications delivered over the internet (see here and here and here for a summary of my opinion on this topic); the default mean to access to applications delivered over the net, will no more be the browser, at least when some significant experience and richness of functionality will be required.

Will Google redefine what we know today as “the browser”? Will Google remove the impedance that somehow forced the two main actors in this space (IE and Firefox) to comply (at least formally) to standards?

Again, if Google will indeed go into the Browser business, all what it gave away so far could be interpreted as a way to create “addiction“, so that people will find it normal that Google will also revolutionize the browser space. After all, Google is not perceived as the “bad boys in the block“, so it is likely that this move will find only few opposers.

Despite these considerations, though, I initially wrote that this may not be a bad outcome for the web. My readers know that I consider that the browser needs a big evolution in order to support the new challenges and the execution of applications delivered over the internet. So, this move may represent a shock that will benefit the whole community.

I wished Firefox and XUL could have become this shock!!!! Perhaps they will anyway (why wouldn’t the GBrowser be based on Firefox after all?)

Of course, this is all speculation at this moment….

Strange logic in this article titled Does JavaFX Spell The End Of AJAX? After reading it I would think that the title would better be Does JavaFX Spell The End of Swing?

So, just few days after Microsoft announced its SilverLight platform, Adobe answered making Flex an Open Source platform. I suggest you have a look at Scoble‘s page “Adobe opensources Flex“, especially for the two videos he recorded with some of the Adobe thinking heads.

Wow! How things are changing fast!

There is one consideration that I want to make here. Now, both Adobe and Microsoft have the following approach to their flagship UI technology:

• An “entry point” offer, freely available or even Open Sourced, which paves the road to the flagship product.

I have been reading about SilverLight, the new technology from Microsoft that has been labeled as the Flash-Killer.
What I find interesting is that the positioning of SilverLight on respect to Windows Presentation Foundation (and Vista in general) from Microsoft seems, to me, very similar to the positioning of Flex with respect to Apollo from Adobe..

It is very much another example of a client-side container that replaces the role played by the Browser so far. With this move, not only Microsoft provides container functuionalities inside the Operating System itself (WPF) but, also, provides an “express version” of it (SilverLight), which does not require Vista and that can work on the Mac.

I am still unclear why Microsoft does not also target Linux. But, probably, there will be someone who will do on their behalf….

I want here to promote the excellent article of my friend Luis: IBM Lotus Connections Demo – The Real Thing .
This post introduces Lotus Connections, the new Social Networking product that IBM announced at Lotusphere.

In this quote from Luis’s post, please find the details about how to get to the live screencast that IBM made available:

As you may be able to see from the Web site where the screencast is stored, you can watch the demo live or rather download it
so that you can view it a later time offline. Whatever is easier for
you. And also for those folks who may be looking for the script of the
screencast you can also download it from here.

Thus without much further ado and without taking too much time off from you for the demo itself, I would strongly encourage you all to take a look into the screencast on Lotus Connections and find out some more as to how IBM
is planning to progress further into adopting social computing within
the Enterprise and beyond. I bet that you will find it quite
entertaining and enlightening. Because, above all, you will be able to
see something very important and which may not be just related to
Connections, nor to IBM itself: the fact that you can conduct effective business
using social computing to address real customers issues and find
solutions for them in the shortest time possible by empowering people
to reach out for information and connect with other knowledge workers. Yes, that is right. Putting together the best of both worlds: knowledge and the people behind that knowledge. Can social computing get better than this? I doubt it.

For the people that start fearing about Google, I suggest reading the following article: Google goes click.
Among the others, I liked this quote:

Further proof, if any were needed, that Google
isn’t a technology company that makes money from ads, it’s an
advertising company that uses technology to lure eyeballs

I start to believe that Internet Search is too delicate a feature, is so important that it cannot be left in the hands of a monopoly.
Internet Search should be property of no one or real competition and alternatives should be promoted.

Few months ago, I was reading an article describing a deviation that the new electronic, synthetic world brought over:  people that pay other people to play electronic games.
In that case, we could say that someone (with probably too much money to waste) payed other people (humans) to play the role of avatars.

Today, I received a mail from a friend in which there was a reference to an article describing a form of vandalism on SecondLife. I am not interested if this really happened in the way it is described…What is true is that this could actually happen (after all, with all the interesting things to read, learn, produce.. aren’t there people that spend (waste) their time creating viruses ? ).

So, I can imagine that a new kind of job may soon be on demand: the virtual bouncer or the virtual security guard. Someone who is payed to control our synthetic house or look the shoulders of our synthetic life…. Cool, isn’t it?

An interesting article “Barrelling Through The Web 2.0 World” highlights parts of a recent Gartner’s report on Web2.0. The article features my friend and IBM colleague Dan Gisolfi.

I extrapolated the sentence

Who is to say the mashup has to remain a Web-based offering ?

because I think that it is very interesting… Not because of its “Web 2.0″ bias (as the article implies) but because of the implications that the mashup technology could have well outside pure browser-based technologies.

Web-based technologies go well beyond their utilisation in browsers. I think that they have their place in Rich Client applications also.

I am thinking here to technologies I know, such as Lotus Expeditor or Lotus SameTime. Where the Composite application model actually allows the integration of content and application delivered over the internet with content and application aggregated from the enterprise SOA.

It is quite sometimes that I have in mind to write down this little comment. I know that, in doing this, I am probably going to be ignored or to be blamed.
But, for all my readers, I am doing this exercise with true humble and open spirit; I am sure that many things I write here represent only a part of the truth, perhaps so little a part…. or perhaps no part at all My objective is to understand where I am wrong: so, please, accept my apologies in advance. After all, the motto of this blog is to have “opinions”…. not “truths” !

So, here is what I do not like in the REST Hype that is around.

• despite it is “de facto” the way the Web works, REST is counter-intuitive to me.
  It is counter-intuitive because since when I first started to program, I was told to use “subprograms”.
  And, when I moved to Object Orientation, I was told to invoke methods on objects.
  In summary: if we need to use an “addressing space” that is as wide as the whole Internet (and, not simply constrained by the virtual memory given to my executable), I do not see why I should change the way in which I am programming…why should I avoid the “invocation” paradigm ?
• I think that REST does not add anything on the top on SOAP (or its XML-RCP ancestor).
  It is isomorphic to SOAP. Just using “nouns” instead of “verbs” simply shifts the complexity from one part to the other…. with the side effect of making the things less clear (at least for me, as I am used to add meaning to the verbs I use to describe “actions”)
• I think that REST assumes that the world is painted with one color only: stateless.
  The reality is seldomly “stateless“.
  A lot of times, it is “stateful”. And, maybe I am wrong, but I think that it is better to consider “stateless” as a subcase of “stateful” than the viceversa.
  Statelessness is great for scalability; of course! The Web is so scalable because it is stateless; sure! But, here we are not talking about pages, we are talking about an “addressing space as wide as the whole internet“. We are talking about applications that use such a big space.
  I understand that the use of REST makes it possible the different caching levels the internet provides; but in so many cases, the data that are manipulated by internet-wide applications are changing so frequently that caching is not an option.
• With REST, the “state transition” is in the protocol. I am used to manage the “state transitions” in my code.
• I fear that REST brings back two-tiers architecture.
  Issuing GET, POST, PUT and DELETE operations on remote resources looks, to me, very much like performing CRUD operations on a remote database: something we have learned not to do.
  I understand that the implementation of a REST service makes sure I am not actually accessing the physical row in a database… but this is true for any RDBMS, actually.

I realize that an important part of the hype on REST is due to the fact that SOAP is so complex!

And I agree that REST is, certainly, a great way to address resources; it is really great when you can easily put an URL into some code and create those cool mashups!
But I would not like to extrapolate that, since something is so easy to use, then it is the only way (or the correct way) to accomplish a given task.

As I said, these are just few thoughts that I have in mind on this subject. I know that there will be arguments to address each of those concerns and to take me back on the “right way of thinking“….

P.S. : By the way; few of the previous thoughts would also apply in favor of an RPC approach to WebServices!