Jan 02

From "You" to "Them"

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:

[timePOY_coverImage.jpg]"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.

Jan 02

How to get Immunity against e-mail?

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. 

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

Nov 21

The Power User wears Prada

The Devil Wears PradaYesterday 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.

Nov 05

Papybook

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…

Oct 15

Mashups, web2.0 and the SOA cake

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 !

Apr 18

IBM Lotus Connections Demo - The Real Thing!

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.

Mar 08

Are Mashups Web-based only offering?

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.

Mar 07

BPM **is** a mashup

Wow! I think this is an interesting quote from the BPM and Enterprise 2.0 panel:

My favourite quote from the panel, from Phil Larson when speaking about mashing up BPM data: “BPM *is* a mashup”.

I never thought in this way, but this is certainly very stimulating as a concept. It is the way in which I always thought to this topic (BPM) in my mind; taking services and visually composing them together in a network in order to create a Composite, Multi-Role and Multi-Step Application.

Feb 21

AJAX second’s birthday. What’s next ?

Today is AJAX’s second birthday, as this article remembers us.

I remember when I started blogging on this topic. And, in all honesty, I have to admit that I got in love with AJAX when it happened. I liked very much the idea of building web applications that “last longer”, that provide a fluid experience to the user and that do not require additional plugins. At that time, in my previous team, we were trying to understand how things like Flex, OpenLaszlo and other technologies would impact the way in which our customers think to Web applications.

Today, after two years and some posts… I changed my mind. I start thinking that AJAX has been artifically keeping the browser alive:

  • regardless of the merits of some of the AJAX technologies that were developed so far
  • beyond the excellents things we see around (more or less everywhere on the web, today! even if one of my favorites is still Zimbra)
  • despite the fact that the emergence of the Web2.0 phenomenon is certainly due to the availability of the AJAX technology (which made people caring of Web2.0 because they could immediately see the advantages)

well, today I am more prone to think that AJAX represents the swan song of the “browser as a mean to execute applications delivered over the web“. The arguments that make me thinking that way have been often posted in this blog.

In the previously mentioned article on AJAX Birthday, I think I agree with what Richard Monson-Haefel wrote:

  • While AJAX has set the world on fire and caused a renaissance in user experience, it’s not the best Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology available today.The technology, or “approach” as some like to say, suffers from serious problems….
  • ….The fact that AJAX has ignited a renewed interest in making the Web a much better user experience is to be applauded, but don’t confuse the hype around the technology with the basic facts about the strengths and weakness of AJAX compared to its counterparts…
  • ….Another area where AJAX really needs to advance is in terms of tooling…
  • …the number of code-level AJAX frameworks and APIs available today is ridiculous. At my last count (August 2006) there were something like 160 AJAX frameworks….
  • …Here is another problem with AJAX, it’s not very deep

Ditto !

Now, I would like to take this opportunity, AJAX’s birthday, to comment on an excellent article, Web 2.0 Re-examined, from Coach Wei, the founder of NexaWeb.

One of the interesting concepts introduced by Coach Wei is the one of “Architecture of Partition“.

The truth of the matter is that neither server centric nor client centric architecture is always appropriate. Unfortunately developers never had the flexibility to deciding the right architectural partition for their applications. Web 2.0 brings architectural partition flexibility to developers for the first time in history. With web 2.0, developers can partition the application in a way that is best appropriate for the application, rather than trying to fit into a pre-determined architecture. Some applications are best served by leaving only user interface and some UI logic on the client side. Some applications require all UI logic on the client side to deliver optimal result. For even more sophisticated applications, there is requirement to have a certain business logic and data on the client side as well. Web 2.0 technologies enable developers to decide how much computation stays on the client side and how much stays on the server side, delivering optimal results.

Somehow, if “Architecture of Participation” represents an Usage Paradigm Shift, the “Architecture of Partition” represents a Technology Paradigm Shift.

This Architecture of Partition is, actually, realized by means of the 3 components drawn by Coach Wei in the picture on the left.

The way in which Coach Wei describes  the Application Client Container (ACC) has many of the points that I try to push since few months:

  1. ACC is stateful. A web browser is designed to be stateless … …but Applications are inherently stateful.
  2. ACC supports asynchronous interactions by default while browsers require careful developer coding to do so
  3. ACC can support offline computing while web 1.0 applications are online only
  4. ACC supports mobile computing as a first class citizen
  5. ACC supports accessibility
  6. ACC supports rich user experience.

We start seeing instances of ACC appearing. Not necessarily, hopefully, in standard browsers!

As to the third component described by coach Wei, I personally think that the “Enterprise Mashup Server” is a component that is realized partly by a Portal (on the Server) and, partly, by some clver use of the ACC. See my post Composite Applications, Mashups and Portals: “relay race” or “team spirit” ? for more details.

In any case, Coach Wei’s paper is the first one I read in which some architectural foundation for the new generation of Web-based applications is depicted.

Today, AJAX’s second birthday, these concepts make a lot of sense to me. Perhaps, the future of AJAX may be in some ACC !

Feb 19

Will browsers ever deliver applications instead of documents?

Finally I found it spelled the way I thought. Great article, Beyond HTTP; something that made me thinking again.

Just yesterday evening, I received a mail from a colleague asking me what did I think about Windows Presentation Foundation and if I have seen the New York Times Reader application.
I replied to him pointing to a series of internal posts I wrote on this subject, especially one in which I was quoting “The browser has a terminal illness and is dying” and another one in whihc I quoted “Death to the Browser“.

What is needed is the Post Browser, the Next Browser, whatever name you want to give to it. Sure, it can still run HTML (the old stuff), in a container that is essentially the same as today’s browser. However it should be capable of complete look-and-feel customization via a standard markup language. It should provide a rich set of custom controls and be able to access the desktop (with appropriate security, of course). It should have a native, secure, bidirectional mechanism, and one that supports multiple connections so that we can access services from multiple sources in a composite application. It should also have extensible controls so that we can extend and improve the behavior of controls and applications as needed.

Ajax is certainly great, but its reality is very much what the author of “Beyond HTTP” says:

I find myself in a bizarre position. The fact that I’m an expert in this kind of thing and have the technical know-how and aptitude to design and pull off such a complex beast on time and as designed means that I got paid quite well for the six months it took to develop, and I’ll continue to get paid as and when upgrades are needed. If any old John Doe could have opened up Visual Studio and slapped it together then I probably wouldn’t find myself getting paid quite so much for my services….
….Compare the Visual Studio .NET Windows Datagrid with its Web-based counterpart. There’s no comparison: a confident user of the former wouldn’t immediately be able to even recognize the latter.

But, even beyond the intricacies of AJAX programming, the real issue is the REST architecture laying behind “the Web as we use it today“:

Finally we get to the rub: The document-based Web as we know it is not a platform for developing complex applications; sure it’s possible and there are plenty of bright people working at places like Google who are doing it as we speak and creating frameworks to make it easier. But is this really the way forward? A tree-based object model accessed by an interpreted scripting engine tacked onto a specification designed for static read-only documents?

So we need to avoid any dogmatism. Again, the author of the article asserts:

Now would be a really good time in history to stop, step back, and look at what we have and what could be done better. What we need is a Web browser that doesn’t just server up documents, but serves up applications: full screen native GUI, network-transparent and, most important, fast, lightweight, real-time applications. Ideally we’d want to start over, build a whole new spec running on an entirely new platform and set of protocols….

it should have state, and that state should begin by initializing the application’s main source file on the server when the client first connects. The application would maintain state between calls, allowing the use of global variables and custom classes that persist…..a move away from the top-heavy and stateless HTTP protocol to a true lightweight binary client/server relationship between the user and the application…

…All it takes is the will to step away from the Web browser and start something new.

I subscribe! :-)

  • I subscribe because I am not against the browser, do not get me wrong! I am in favor of the browser for when it needs to support what it was born for: supporting the delivery of documents and supporting the REST (stateless) model.

  • I subscribe because an evolution of the browser is the only possibility to save it (or to save its central position in the Internet).
    Windows Presentation Foundation” (WPF) seems to be the way that MSFT is taking to make the browser irrelevant. WPF Applications can be delivered as Web Browser Applications : “…from the user’s point of view, no installation occurred, but rather an application was “ephemerally” loaded into the user’s browser in much the same way an HTML page is loaded. In a sense, it feels as though the user simply “visited” the application…

  • I subscribe even if I find that “AJAX is a cool thing“.
    But, somehow, AJAX (with which I got in love a couple of years ago), seems to me today the swan song of the “browser as it is today“.

  • I subscribe because I start suffering from the limitations of an AJAX model which forces me to open a new browser tab to cope with anything I need.
    Web2.0 and AJAX are different things!
    AJAX may not be always the best technology to support Web2.0

  • I subcribe because, as the New York Times reader example shows, the risk is that we will not compete on the AJAX battleground in the future:
    • Microsoft with Windows Presentation Foundation is pushing for a convergence between standard applications and internet applications
    • and Adobe with Project Apollo is freeing Flex from the constraints of the Browser

    The battleground is already shifting!

  • I subscribe because of the laws of evolution.
    I think that the only reason to keep the “browser as it is today” alive is that it took so much effort to arrive to an agreement! All that effort sorts of prevents people to recognize that the laws of evolution apply in this domain also… and that the glorious browser has made its time.

Certainly, the “Browser as it is today” will stay, probably forever (after all, the reason for not driving all on the right side of the road is because of too much legacy ;-) ). A “cheap”, “ubiquitous” layer to access the information everywhere will always be required:

  • certainly to support the access to static, REST, stateless content.

  • Perhaps to support many of the pervasive Web2.0 things…

But real-world application development leveraging the Internet that goes unnoticed by the photo-sharing, music-downloading, blogging masses” may really benefit from a quantum-leap in this area.

Why not starting from XUL? It is declarative, it can be hosted in browsers….

Oct 09

Composite Applications, Mashups and Portals: “relay race” or “team spirit” ?

I take the time to start posting some thoughts on Composite Applications and, more specifically, on Mashups. It is some time that I have this in mind but I have always been struggling with the lack of a coherent approach in writing this down. Not that today I found this coherence or I am ready to write properly what I think… but at least I found an excuse in an article that grabbed my attention.
The article which gave me the trigger is, incidentally, AJAX Composite Apps - The Last Mile Between Your Users and Your SOA.
The article starts with an interesting sentence:

In the IT industry we also have our “last mile”: putting the right application in the hands of the end user. Composite applications address this “last mile”, combining a rich user interface with SOA-driven application integration technology.

Yes, I think that the analogy is interesting. It continues saying:

Composite applications are nothing new. Analysts have been talking about composite applications since the birth of the Internet and in more urgent tones during the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) generation of integration technology

and, towards the end, goes deeper:

Portals were arguably the first generation of composite applications. Today composite applications can offer a much richer application development platform through service-based integration (instead of the kind of integration in the application server that runs the portal) and the highly interactive user environment offered by AJAX-enabled rich Internet applications. With this trend, some analysts have predicted that composite applications signal the beginning of the end for portal-based applications. In reality, the primary functions of portals and composite applications complement each other well. A portal can “wrap” and pass through users seamlessly to a composite application, containing it wholly. Conversely, a composite application can wrap a portal (or portlet more likely), as part of the application, perhaps even invoking it with parameters that tie it into the rest of the composite application.

As I wrote in my post titled Two faces of the same coin, the integration space is huge. In order to do a job, in order to do a task in general (I would say), everybody needs to integrate information and tools coming from different directions.

  • Some of them are mandated.
    For instance, in a working context, some of these information and tools are mandated by the company’s business process; it is the view that the company has on the activity you have to do.
    Outside of a working context, mandated information and tools are the ones that derive from experience, from common wisdom or from convention.
  • Some others are specific to each individual.
    In a working context, for instance, two enginers may do things differently because of the personal taste and experience, the curiosity, the culture.
    And this is true also outside of the working context.
    I would say that this “part” is what distinguishes an artist from an other….. and this should be well known to software engineers, right?
  • So, these two sides are really important. They complement each other. Today is hardly possible (at least in the Western world) to think to a job where an individual is not asked to bring her/his own “approach, experience, information, tool“… This is why, I think, our governements are very attentive to the school system.

    So, how this matters in the context of the Portal and Composite Applications?

    I think that a Portal is the way in which the “mandated information and tools” are made available to an individual. A Portal actually aggregates the info and tools that the “owner of the business process” delivers to someone in a given role. These info and tools are part of the arsenal of the company, either directly (because they are physically owned by the company) or indirectly (because the company believes that this material found elsewhere is useful for you… and perhaps pays a fee for making it available to you).

    A Mashup is the equivalent, in my opinion, of the “personal knowledge” that an individual brings to the table in order to do her/his job in a personal way. I may be wrong but, if you allow me for one second to escape the technical limitation imposed by today’s browsers sandboxes, a Mashup is something that I bring into my workspace in order to do things better. There is a lot of accent on the user, on the way in which each individual plays herself/himself in the context of a given activity; it is her/his “engagement”, her/hos “flavor in doing the job”.

    At this point, a Composite Application describes the way in which these two sides are combined.

    I start thinking that my previous post (and the analogy with the hemisperes) is getting more clear now. The Portal is the way in which the “company side” (I would also say, the “server side”, at least in the mahjority of situations) of the picture is delivered to you (I call it the South Hemisphere). And the Mashups is the way in which the “personal side” (I would also say the “client side”…) of the picture is used by you (I call it the North Hemisphere).

    In both situations, of course (and the author of the article is right) SOA is important.

    And it is in this context that an architecture like the one of IBM’s Managed Client (see here) will make the most of sense. Even if it does not yet brings inside the picture the concept of Mashups, i.e. the concept of components that the final user can aggregate in an autonomous way to complement what the “server” brings to her/him.

    I am not bashing AJAX here, of course. But AJAX is not always the right answer.

    Sep 16

    Do I need a Second Life?

    Few years ago, when I bought my first PC, I saw many friends and colleagues that were spending part of their time playing with videogrames. I always wanted to try and, actually, I even bought some game for the PC…
    I think they are still in their original boxes. I never had time to play, and even to install them. Or, let’s state it better: I always found something different to do with a PC than playing a game. There were things to learn!

    The PC also brought into the game a new profile: the people who invent viruses (and similar stuff). I realized that writing viruses or exploting weaknesses in the installed software is, actually, not trivial. And it certainly requires time (I imagine this, obviously I never developed a virus!). I have always been asking myself: aren’t there so many interesting things to do with the computer instead of “wasting time” to offend what others try to do?

    Now, I am reading about SecondLife and all the new Virtual Reality games and environments. And, once again, I am behind. I am tempted, I really would like to know more….

    …. but in this case, it is not simply the “lack of time” or the different prorities that are slowing me down. This time I am sort of “blocked” by something different.

    I have not enough time and energy to live my primary life, that I do not see the need to start living a secondary one.

    I understand that there is a lot of fun and of cool things in this technology. And this “technological aspect” is really thrilling…. but, am I the only one who would rather try to live better his primary life?

    I know that ignoring new technologies is not a good approach. But, isn’t there a limit? I do not want to become the old guy who thinks that there is too much modernization and that the world is going to fall…. All things may have a good and a bad use….

    But, I prefer to write this post myself instead of having my avatar writing it on my behalf.

    Or not?

    Aug 27

    Two faces of the same coin

    A series of articles trigger this post. Among them, two above all:

    I could summarize the ideas behind them in the following way.

    Enterprise Mashups represent, on the desktop, what SOA represents on the server. And that what matters, on the client as well as on the server, is how these technologies allow the execution of Business Processes.

    This is great!
    In my presentation “Thoughts for a Rich Client”, I sort of developed the concept of 360 degrees integration.
    See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download  the highest resolution version available.Let’s represent the integration space with our Globe: we have a Southern and a Northern hemisphere.

    The Southern hemisphere represents the kind of integration that happens on th server. This integration is made possible by an architectural pattern (SOA) and conveyed to us by a Portal. Ismael’s article describes so well how this is all about Business Process, because the reason to adopt an SOA is indeed the one to automate an existing Business Process (or to implement a new one).
    By the way, I have written a little comment to Ismael’s article in which I try to explain my position.

    The Northern hemisphere is a new territory. Until recently, the desktop has been considered simply as a projection of something that was happening on the server. Infact, a Portal is aggregating content that is simply displayed inside a browser. In the Web world, the Presentation Layer of an application has normally been executed on the server, leaving to the desktops the simple task to display something happening elsewhere.
    The advent of AJAX (and of other rich client technologies, including Lotus Expeditor) and the evolution of the technologies in the browser space made it possible to actually consider the client as a first-class citizen in the SOA world; for the first time in the web era, the Presentation Layer (or a part of it) could be implemented outside of the server, “after the web server”, on the other side of the pipe….
    This makes it possible to perform aggregation also on the client. call this aggregation “enterprise mashup” or “rich portal”…. at the end, what these technologies allow, is the implementation of the client side of Business Processes.

    The Business Process can now be described and properly automated in its more natural way: a rich set of cooperating tools, information and applications allow users, from their desktop, to properly use orchestrated services. The formal, top-down processes described and executed on the servers are made available to users who can recompose them in ways that exploit the innovation and foster the flexibility required by new enterprises.

    So, BPM on one side and Enterprise Mashups on the other, can actually represent two faces of the same coin. The coin of the “enteprise business processes”.

    P.S. Other articles that contributed to this where: