Mashup Camp 2 Day 1: AJAX design patterns

Veneer was great, but short, so I’m on to Sarah Harmer’s You Were Here. I’m starting to slow down — it’s was a long day of travel yesterday and a long day of idea generation today — so may not finish up all my posts today.

The next session for me was AJAX design patterns, which was good although focussed a bit too much on security issues for what I was looking for. Some great stuff on UI and performance issues. The wiki page has all the technical details, includes references to further JSON reading, so I’ll just touch on some of the things that stuck in my mind during the session about AJAX UI design:

  • Action of the back button: was the last user activity a navigation or an action? Can it be “undone” by navigating back, or is it appropriate to return to a higher level/home page?
  • Action of the refresh button.
  • URL and permalinks: appended # arguments that don’t hit the server but are pure client processes to make the AJAX calls. Implications for search engines (agents can’t index pages directly and would require an alternative representation to be referenced by robots.txt, but doesn’t handle issues of relevancy through links), emailing permalink references.
  • Tradeoffs between user experience and technical issues.
  • Some actions need to be synchronous (e.g., “buy it” and other transactions), requires forcing synchronicity in AJAX or breaking out of AJAX for that part of the transaction.

Mashup Camp 2 Day 1: Mashdowns

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had to do all my blogging today offline because of the spotty wifi in the Computer History Museum, and I have to say that Windows Notepad makes a pretty sucky offline blogging tool. However, I’m relaxing back in my room listening to the newly-downloaded and extremely enjoyable Veneer (just available on iTunes, after I couldn’t buy the CD after a month of trying on Amazon.ca), cleaning up the blog posts and paper notes from today.

Following the kickoff session, we headed off to breakout sessions proposed by anyone and everyone during the kickoff. Each session was supposed to update the wiki with notes from anyone at the session, and you can find the grid of sessions here with links to the wiki pages with the notes. I’ll link to the notes for each of the sessions that I attended.

The first one that I headed to was “Mashdowns: mashing for competitive advantage in rich client/enterprise applications”, led by Mike Fisher and Ben Widhelm from ElephantDrive. They see this as a second generation of mashups: more tightly integrated into desktop or enterprise applications, and more focussed on “doing” rather than “consuming” — which seems pretty much aligned with my ideas about BPM and mashups. I hate their term “mashdown”, however, preferring the more-commonly used “enterprise mashup”. Really, the distinction between first and second generation mashups is primarily between consumer mashups and business/enterprise mashups.

We gathered a number of ideas about the difference between first and second generation mashups:

  • First generation mashups are about the “what”, and are primarily about aggregating/joining/federating data. They’re generally seen as useful by users (consumers), and because they’re focussed on the consumer market, they tend to be public, and developed rapidly and a bit loosely. The revenue model is usually based on ad revenues, since few end-users pay for the mashups.
  • Second generation mashups are about the “how”, and are about aggregating external and internal (enterprise) services. They’re useful to business for all the usual business ROI reasons: improving process efficiency, reducing IT costs and increasing business agility; like any other plan that reduces technology capital investment, they also tend to level the playing field for smaller companies since they can use the same technology as the big guys but not have to build it or buy it outright. Unlike the consumer mashups, however, they have to be industrial-strength, private and secure. Equally importantly, they have to be supported by some sort of service level agreement backed by appropriate high availability and disaster recovery scenarios, which most of the current API vendors are not willing to provide.

The key difference for me is that second generation mashups are about integrating into the business processes. This breakout was a significant conversation since it’s the first one that I’ve heard at either Mashup Camp where business processes were a major focus. I’m feeling very positive about BPM and Web 2.0 today.

We had a conversation about one of the main problems of enterprise mashups, which is their current lack of acceptance by IT. Part of this is IT attitudes: not trusting the external APIs, either in terms of data integrity or in terms of reliability, plus the NIH problem. An equally important part is the relatively lack of readiness of the APIs themselves in terms of SLAs, authentication and other indutrial-grade issues that would have external APIs be on equal footing alongside internal ones. Even with internal-only mashups, that use lighter-weight mashup techniques on internal APIs, there’s resistance to a new way of doing things. That really comes back to the question of the the difference between a mashup and any other web services orchestration, especially as lightweight (non-WS-*) integration methods are used for faster application assembly internally.

This was a great session for focussing my thoughts on how to talk to my enterprise customers about mashups.

Michael Scherotter was also there from Mindjet, distributing copies of their application on flashdrives. Haven’t had a chance to install and try it out yet.

Mashup Camp 2 kickoff

David Berlind started Mashup Camp 2 a bit after 9am (which is great for us east coasters, but probably early for the locals) with the logistics and agenda framework for the day. As with Mashup Camp 1, and any other unconference, there is no real agenda, just time slots and rooms where anyone who has a topic of interest can faciliate a session. Kudos to David for getting this off the ground successfully — again! — and attracting almost 400 people here for the two days.

This was followed by all of the API/technology providers giving their 30-second spiel on what they do: EVDB, Yahoo Local (maps), AOL (mashup hosting, OpenAIM API, MapQuest, MusicNow), Microsoft Live, Commendo, Good Storm, Webalo, HotOrNot, Intel, Amazon, Plaxo, StrikeIron, OpenID, IBM, eBay (he introduced his company as “a small internet auction company”), Zazzle, Mindjet, O’Reilly, 411sync, Mobido, and at least one other that I missed. I don’t recall anyone from Google up there, but they have a strong enough presence here that that’s probably not required.

After that, the interesting part started: anyone interested in leading a session or making a presentation wrote their idea on a page, announced it into the microphone and stuck it on the schedule, with developers having first dibs on the time and space. There are a ton of interesting sessions proposed for the next two days: voting (as in political), data mining, PHP, user retention, music/movies, API versioning/backwards compatibility, using mashups for prototyping, mashups for non-geeks/small businesses, Google Checkout/AdWords mashup, client-side customization, incorporating mashups into desktop/enterprise environments (“mashdowns”), Ruby on Rails hands-on mashup development, wikis as a mashup platform (specifically twiki), social networking, API pricing models and licensing, content taxonomies, microformats and standardization for APIs, monetization of mashups, access control/authentication for feeds, security and identity, API developer programs, email mashups, aggregating profile data from different web sources, multimedia mashups, business-oriented mashups, mapping mashups (from the guy who developed Frappr), user-centricity, Google Gadgets, mobile mashups, open source social entrepreneurship and more.

I have no idea how I’m going to see all the things that I want to see. I do know that the wifi in the museum is spotty, and I’m having a hard time staying connected, so all this blogging will pile up for the end of the day.

Back at Mashup Camp

Or is that Mashup Camp 2.0? I’m back at the delightfully quirky Hotel Avante again, meeting up with some people who I met back at the original Mashup Camp in February, and starting to meet a bunch of new people. We’ll all be off to the Computer History Museum in the morning for the official start; tonight was a party by the pool (unfortunately I arrived a bit late and missed most of the action) and some great demos to a lot of people in a tiny room.

I had the Air Canada experience from hell getting here, which probably deserves a post of its own about total lack of good customer service as well as a web user interface that doesn’t bother to tell you when you just paid $855 for a ticket but don’t actually have a reserved seat on the plane…

Webinar on SOA standards and CentraSite

I’m tuned into an ebizQ webinar on SOA standards, News Break: The First Standards-Based SOA Forum to Manage and Govern Your SOA. This link should be good for replay within a couple of hours after the webinar, or within a couple of days if you want the full version with the live Q&A. By the way, whatever happened to the link that would add the webinar directly to my Outlook calendar? I miss that! I’m simultaneously blogging (obviously), packing for my trip to Mashup Camp and listening to the fire alarms being tested in my building, so this may not be as detailed as usual.

The presenters are Keith Swenson of Fujitsu (who I’ve met a couple of times), Daryl Plummer of Gartner (who I heard speak at their BPM Summit earlier this year), Paul Butterworth of AmberPoint, Peter Kuerpick of Software AG and Jean Francois Abramatic of ILOG. The blurb for the webinar promised:

[A]n exciting multi-vendor announcement on how the leading SOA vendors are partnering to achieve a common SOA infrastructure. This initiative will leverage an open, standards based SOA registry and repository to manage and govern the complete SOA landscape. It will allow you to analyze interdependencies in your SOA including services, processes, applications and other SOA components.

In other words, now that most vendors have figured out that most customers are not going to be using a single-vendor SOA infrastructure, they’re getting together to build some standards in the area of registry and repository.

Plummer started with a message about the importance of SOA governance, and the recent focus on this by many organizations. He stepped through Gartner’s models of an SOA framework and service registry, and touched on policy management and a few other governance-related issues. He laid a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the webinar, since SOA governance is a key driver for standards.

Up next were Kuerpick and Swenson, the two webinar sponsors, to talk about the CentraSite Community, with is both a standards-based SOA forum and a product that provides an open registry and repository, impact analysis tools, and governance tools that store, tracks and analyze processes and their underlying services and interdependencies. They launched a canned demo of CentraSite that is also available on the site, which happens at just below light-speed, so I’ll need another viewing to catch all the details, but it appears to be all browser-based and has some interesting functionality especially around interdependencies of services. CentraSite is already supported by several vendors, and any standards-based vendor should be able to publish directly to it but would need to get a bit more involved to be a full player. It will be interesting to see how this catches on over the coming months, and if it manages to sort out some of the SOA confusion.

One really interesting point is that both XPDL and BPEL are mentioned explicitly, and BPMN was also mentioned although it’s not on the slides and isn’t used in representing business processes within CentraSite as far as I could see in the demo. CentraSite is not a standards organizations, and much of the underlying standards work will be done by the existing standards bodies such as OASIS.

There is a community edition that is free of charge, and you can register to download a product evaluation.

More to come on this in the future, I’m sure.

BPM = Car and motorcycle tax?

Tonight I found a new BPM blog in Dutch, BPM Scriptie, from the Netherlands. My Dutch being non-existant, I used Babelfish to try and get the gist of what he’s writing (Google Translation doesn’t do Dutch, unfortunately). All machine translations are a bit funny, but this one was especially weird: “BPM” is being translated as “car and motorcycle tax”, making the blog title “Car and Motorcycle Tax Scriptie”.

I’m assuming that scriptie is Dutch for blog, but I’m still trying to figure out the car and motorcycle tax part…

ABPMP Toronto — first meeting

I’m heading off to the first meeting of the newly-forming Association of Business Process Management Professionals Toronto chapter. I had posted a comment about ABPMP somewhere, and heard back from the organizers about starting a Toronto chapter, leading to today’s meeting of like-minded people here in Toronto.

If you’re interested in getting involved, check the ABPMP Toronto chapter page or join our Yahoo discussion group. If you’re an ABPMP member in another region, I’d love to hear about what your chapter does.

Cardiff’s TeleForm V10

I had a discussion last week with Mark Seamans, the general manager of Cardiff, about their V10 release of TeleForm and where it plays in the BPM market (you can find the full press release here).

They’re really a content capture company, both from paper and e-forms, and they do that well — I’m familiar with them from years ago when workflow always involved imaging, and Cardiff was used for both intelligent paper document capture and e-forms in order to greatly improve productivity — I’ve written before about the powerful combination of BPM and e-forms. However, Autonomy/Cardiff now seems to be lumped into the ever-expanding BPM space and it might be hard for them to get the attention that they deserve in such a diverse market, most of which does not compete with them at all.

Gartner’s latest report on BPM classifies them in the “Vendors That Warrant Special Mention”, which sounds a bit like getting the congeniality award at a beauty pageant, but qualifies that by saying that BPM specialists like Cardiff have some capabilities that could compete with true BPMS vendors but that they’re focussed on a specific use case. For Cardiff, that use case is as a lightweight, forms-centric, document-processing flow that provides intelligent/automated data entry to back-office systems such as SAP. Typically, this might include hybrid processes such as printing barcoded forms, then the subsequent rendezvous of the scanned form when it returns to the data entry flow, or purely electronic e-forms data entry. Their focus is on “scan to process” rather than “scan to capture”, where the scanned image is not necessarily required for processing once the data has been captured from it, and may even be discarded. Cardiff can use the IWay adapters for connecting to various systems, or invoke web services, or take advantage of what their partner channel has built for integration where the former two methods fail.

I still think that this is a case of a vendor in a niche market — albeit a successful niche — getting swamped by the Tower of Babel effect from an overly-wide range of products all being classified as BPM. Cardiff holds an important piece of the puzzle for some customers, especially in highly-regulated industries with strict compliance rules, and it would be good if the customers could figure out which pieces to fit together.

BPTrends State of BPM survey

The BPTrends survey, The State of Business Process Management, has just been published and is available free (registration required). Half of the 348 respondents to the survey are process practitioners or business analysts, with the remainder split between business, IT and executive management.

The survey asked some interesting questions, such as the meaning of BPM (only 16% identify it as the BPMS software, whereas 40% see it as the methodology) and the current committment of their organization to BPM (split pretty evenly between “major/significant” and “limited/just looking/no interest”). And although reducing costs is still the biggest single driver, agility, compliance and customer satisfaction are gaining ground. There are also a number of interesting results on how consistently processes are performed within the organization.

Not surprisingly to me, although it may come as a bit of a smack to BPMS vendors, is that over half consider their most important BPM software tool to be a modeling tool, either a purely graphical tool such as Visio, a repository-based tool such as ProVision or an organizational modeling environment. In fact, BPMS only scored 12% of the votes on that question.

Unlike many of the other BPTrends reports, this appears to be vendor-neutral and not “pay for play”, so may carry more weight than some of their other reports that I’ve written about in the past.