Application Architecture, Development & Integration

Anthony Bradley just posted Talking Operational Intelligence with Kapow.  The post mentions a cool new iPhone app for Summit Agenda Planning.  Those of you with iPhones should definitely check it out, and others can see a version rendered through a regular browser on their computer.

This is a great example of a mash-up.  I’m not sure about all the details, but I heard that it took less than three hours to create this.  It just goes to show that if you follow basic WOA principles, the ability to compose new capabilities is amazingly quick for a very broad potential audience!  Nick Gall happens to have just post a related set of thoughts in Generic Identifiers aka Web Scale Identifiers.

Yesterday’s post on mash-ups touched on one example of a ‘new era’ in application development.  This new era is categorized by several key shifts and new capabilities:

• Increasing uptake of agile methodologies by both development organizations and - more importantly – acceptance of (and engagement in) iterative methods by business people
• New development environments and technologies, increasingly leveraging the simplicity and speed of the web/Internet and social software
• Development organizations better understanding and embracing service-oriented development concepts
• Application leaders recognizing that the main challenge continues to be one of driving changes in behavior and culture
• A wide variety of non traditional developers suddenly having the ability to compose or orchestrate new, combinatorial capabilities out of a variety of existing applications/services
• Etc. (add in your own additional attributes of new era app dev)

Because we believe this new era of development represents both tremendous opportunity and a whole new minefield of risks, we have created an entire track of sessions focsed on Embracing New Era Application Development Practices.  Make sure to check out Thomas Murphy’s keynote for this track – The Future and Present of AD.

During an executive briefing in Nashville last week, I was asked to provide examples of mash-ups.  My initial reaction was to point to the obvious ones like the ’store locator’ function in just about every retailers web site.  Then, I showed some neat examples that Garmin has done in their MotionBased site mashing together GPS data from workouts, weather info, and an animated map showing you where you ran or biked during a workout.

It became apparent that the person asking the question wanted examples of ‘unintended consequences’, which led me to point them to the congressional travel analysis on opensecrets.org – click on any of the congressmen’s names in the table.  As I was doing this I remembered an even better example, which is this Diet Coke and Mentos video.  In both of these cases, the original creators of the discrete pieces probably never thought about what would happen if they were combined.

We all need to start thinking this through as we make various services available either internally or externally.  Attend Anthony Bradley’s session on Enterprise Mash-ups to get a better feel for this and attend his Analyst/User Roundtable - Lessons Learned in Enterprise Mash-ups to participate in a discussion on this phenomenon.  Also, check out Anthony’s MacGyver blog post on this.

When you are paddling along, it is often hard to tell that you are riding on top of a big wave. We believe that Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) are part of such a wave building around off-premise application delivery.
David Cearley will present the Cloud Computing Scenario for breakfast on Wednesday. There are many more cloud computing-related sessions, which will help you separate the useless vapor in many cloud stories from things that you should actually consider pursuing.

 
Ben Pring, who co-leads our research community on Software as a Service (SaaS), will present SaaS: The Future of Business Applications. He will also hold an anlayst user roundtable on lessons learned in Integrating SaaS into You Application Portfolio.