The popularity of widgets these days has brought to attention the need for
interoperability, i.e. for widgets developed for one site or platform to be
able to run in other sites and widgets developed by different people to be
able to work with each other.
So much so that I know of at least 3 somewhat competing specifications for
widgets.
There's the gadget portion of the OpenSocial specs which was adopted from the
Google Gadgets work. Then there's OpenAjax which is more broadly focused on
Ajax interoperability but has a lot of pieces geared towards widget
interoperability.
And finally there's the W3C's Widgets 1.0 Family of Specifications. Based on
a preliminary analysis, the OpenAjax specs appear to be the most
comprehensive for widget interoperability issues but OpenSocial seems to have
gained more adoption.
The W3C work appears to be moving very slowly (no surp... (more)
I've recently asked one of my developers to research some integration and
middleware technologies for a project we're working on. After spending a
couple days on this, he said to me "these things are all part of ESBs now" -
i.e. all the integration and middleware vendors have pretty much taken these
capabilities and bundled them into their ESB platforms.
"Oh you need a message bus? That's part of our ESB now." "Oh you need this
adapter? That's included in our ESB."
In most cases when you're implementing an SOA, you will need some piece of
middleware or integration technology. With ... (more)
Enterprise information integration (EII) is getting a lot of hype these days,
and the vendors are giving you very compelling reasons for why you need an
enterprise data access layer based on their EII product. However, a lot of
the scenarios and case studies they present are very targeted or are simple
examples of how their product works that don't delve into the complexities of
a real-world environment. This article presents some of those complexities
and demonstrates how some of the EII products may not provide adequate
functionality for an environment with such complexities.
... (more)
It has become very popular to build web sites that use and embed widgets from
various providers. For example, MySpace and Facebook let their users easily
embed various JavaScript widgets and Flash-based applications and videos onto
their personal pages. In most cases, the widgets act in a standalone fashion,
unaware of the other widgets contained on the same page. Standalone widgets
are fine for simple portal pages but for more targeted applications some
level of interaction among the components on the page is needed. When such
interactions are needed, they are usually achieved t... (more)
A lot of folks talk describe the main benefit of SOA is the increased agility
that it brings to the organization; mainly describing the architectural and
technical approaches and mechanisms that bring about increased agility. The
problem with that is that the barriers to agility at many different
organizations are not technical in nature. Take the government for example,
the reason it takes them such a long time to roll out a change in their IT
systems is due to the processes or bureacracy that exists not because of
technical challenges. Technical challenges exist but they are no... (more)
Tieu Luu works at SuprTEK where he helps the U.S. government create and implement strategies and architectures that apply innovative technologies and approaches in IT. You can read more of Tieu’s writing at his blog at http://tieuluu.com/blog.
John Crupi
Yakov Fain
David Linthicum
David Lucas
Cathy Lopez
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
