Late spring in San Francisco signals the beginning of the summer fog but for Java developers there is a more significant annual milestone: JavaOne rolls into town. Since its inception in 1996, the conference has been the focal point for showcasing the latest and greatest in Java development. ILOG has maintained a presence here for the last decade and this year the focus is on the JViews graphical component suite.

Rich internet applications

“There is a particularly strong interest in thin client development, giving us ample opportunity to show off our Ajax components”, says Ed Kiraly from ILOG’s visualization product marketing team. “The whole Rich Internet Application (RIA) space is hot right now” explains the JavaOne veteran. Large enterprise players from Cisco to Tibco are showing a strong interest in smart thin clients and rich web interfaces. ILOG, as

ILOG’s Elixir offering built atop Adobe’s Flex framework is also interesting in this respect. Although how exactly do you hook up Java applications to this interface? Duane Nickull from Adobe answered this question for me, explaining how Adobe’s service oriented Lifecyle ES (Enterprise Suite), a J2EE server, forms the vital bridge between data and display.

Internalizing Google Map Mashups

On the subject of data and display, Ed drew my attention to a particularly interesting application of a Google Maps mashup that the JViews development team have produced. Blinking lights and bright green pipes over the map of San Francisco showed specific traffic movement across San Francisco’s highways. This in itself is nothing new and there are countless examples of these kinds of applications across the web. Where this gets interesting is when you realize the data overlayed on top of Google Maps is internal - something not possible with a generic implementation of Google’s API. Possible applications? How about an organization mapping out movements of its sales team for internal monitoring.

A global feel

So, where is most prospective interest coming from? According to ILOG sales rep Mark Steidel, booth visitors aren’t restricted to North America. There is interest from Canada and Europe and further afield Asia as well. Mark states JavaOne is by far the most important event for ILOG’s visualization product line.

The human face of Java

With the proliferation of enterprise-level development platforms over the last few years, Sun Microsystems really has its work cut out staying on top of the game.

‘Java + You’ is the JavaOne theme this year. This roughly translates as offering you (the consumer) the services you want, whether it be consumer-level or enterprise-level software. Sun is there, slap-bang in the middle. More human, nay more sexy, as Sun proved with the center-stage placement of that music god of the old-school Silicon Valley set: Neil Young. The approach has worked, if the front pages of the tech dailies are anything to go by.

Meanwhile, on the pavilion floor Project Wonderland takes pride of place among the sprawling Java booth space. This toolkit allows developers to build 3D virtual worlds in Second Life, linking up live applications like web browsers and Sun’s own OpenOffice documents.

Off-topic

ILOG Technical Account Manager (TAM) Dan Jeffrey recommended Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s treatise on the behaviour of networks: Linked. Especially pertinent in these times when the conception, construction and management of online social networks is all the rage.

Jon Ferraiolo works for IBM but works more or less full time heading up the OpenAjax Alliance. Ajax is the power behind mashups, and because mashups take components from different suppliers, interoperability, and therefore the work of the OpenAjax Alliance, is critical.

IBM quickly recognized the importance of defining an agile, open source industry group to defined standards for the industry.

The key concepts behind Web 2.0 are community, collaboration, user experience, and user generated content. Going beyond user-generated content, mashups allow the creation of user-generated applications.

Mashups are about self-service application development, enabling organizations to move to the next level of innovation, speed, and agility by allowing users to combine and remix different sets of data in new ways. In this way, mashups can provide insight into corporate data that was simply not possible before.

Many people are unclear about the difference between mashups and portals (including Jon). Portals typically provide a predefined set of mini applications or widgets. Mashups allow users to reach outside the organization and combine external feeds with existing data sources to create their own widgets and personlized dashboards.

IBM has developed several technology platforms to assist in the creation of mashups and widgets:

• Mashup hub
• QED wiki (screencast here)

These technologies are being fed into IBM’s commercial application Lotus Mashups which enables instant deployment of custom mashup widgets (which Jon described as “prepackaged application components”).

IBM of course is not the only company developing and producing widgets and mashup technology. The amount of innovation going on in the mashup/widget space is extraordinary. However, this also represents one of the biggest challenges facing the industry: interoperability.

The Open Ajax Alliance is working to create the Open Ajax Metadata wrapper standard, as well as open source transcoders for various proprietary widget formats to allow different mashup technologies to work together easily.

The other major challenge of course is security. IBM and the Open Ajax Alliance are developing and promoting a secure runtime environment for mashups, that is being dubbed, appropriately, “SMASH” (for Secure Mashups).

Jon Ferraiolo will present “The Power of Mashup Technology—Helping the Enterprise Meet the Promise of Web 2.0 and SOA” at DIALOG 08 on Monday Feb 25th, 11.30 am - 12.00 pm.

Web 2.0, Mashups, SOA: Probably the top three buzzwords around at the moment in enterprise IT. All credit to Jon Ferraiolo, then, for managing to squeeze all three of them into the title of his DIALOG 08 keynote presentation (just edging out fellow IBM colleague Sandy Carter who managed only two out of three for her “New Language of Business” keynote earlier the same morning!)

But nobody can accuse Jon Ferraiolo of jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. In fact, Jon is probably about as far as you can get from being an upstart fly-by-night, here-today-gone-tomorrow hipster.

As director of operations for the OpenAjax Alliance (the primary standards and advocacy group for Ajax), Jon has been working feverishly within IBM’s Emerging Technologies group and The OpenAjax Alliance since 2006 to help establish key mashup standards that will allow the industry to achieve the full benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Before joining IBM, Jon worked for Adobe for 13 years as product manager, architect, and engineering manager on products that included Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop and was also principal architect for Adobe’s SVG product efforts.

In presenting mashups as a revolutionary new approach to application development, Jon will draw on his vast experience and knowledge of the field and provide a compelling argument as to why businesses must embrace Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 approaches if they hope to remain competitive.

Originally planned as part of the conference’s Visualization track, Jon’s session was deemed to have such broad appeal and relevance that it was promoted to a cross-track keynote - kind of appropriate for a presentation about mashups, I think :-).

I, for one, will be all ears.