First a quick introduction as this is my first blogpost here. My name is Jnan Dash and I am the Chief Strategy Officer at Curl since mid-2006. My background is almost 30 years of system software development (16 years at IBM building DB2 product family and 10 years at Oracle as head of strategy and technology for the database server products).
This post will briefly look at 3 hot acronyms making the rounds these days - SOA, Web 2.0, and RIA.
- For last few years, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has been branded as the big force to cause IT disruption. Someone said, the half-life for hardware is 18 months, whereas the half-life for software is 18 years. So 30 years ago, we had structured programming. Then came Object Oriented programming almost 20 years ago. Now we have "service" as the new abstraction in constructing flexible applications. So business logic (code) encapsulated as "services" can be invoked and assembled as applications to mirror the business process (not the other way around).
- Web 2.0 is the hottest buzzword since end of 2005. When five thousand people are denied access to a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year, you know something is happening. Web 2.0 is the new avatar of the Web as a serious platform for building read-write applications. It also emphasizes "harnessing collective intelligence" of the user community. The term Enterprise 2.0 points to the usage of Web 2.0 technologies (mostly deployed in consumer space so far) in enterprises. In other words, Web 2.0 for an enterprise will combine collaborative behavior with transactional behavior.
- RIA (Rich Internet Applications) specifically refers to the development aspects of highly interactive web applications which can range from simple to very complex. Enterprises stuck in old client-server technologies for past 15 years want to embrace the Web as the user interface, instead of the desktop. With RIA, enterprises can combine the best of client-server (rich user interactions) with the ubiquity of the Web. However, many web technologies from the past (DHTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM, Flash/Flex, VB) have serious limitations in terms of high-end scalability, security, reliability, and programmer productivity (read cost and complexity). Martin Heller at InfoWorld does a comprehensive job explaining RIA.
There has to be a merger of these trends and Darryl Taft in an article in eWeek talks about this. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term to describe a set of trends and technologies such as wikis, blogs, mashups, tags, etc. Most of these are used in the consumer websites. As we focus on enterprises endorsing the web for serious business applications to lower cost and enhance user experience, an RIA front-end using Web 2.0 style approach, combined with an SOA-backend becomes the new merged architecture. The Curl product (based on research work at MIT) is an ideal front-end RIA platform for SOA-backend for enterprises. It was designed to address scalability, complex visualization, stateful transactions, reliability, and extreme performance.