Cloud computing influences mashups and middleware – but midrange legacy won’t move soon

Last week on SearchSOA.com James Denman published a podcast interview with mashup expert Michael Ogrinz, author of “Mashup Patterns.” Naturally, they spoke about enterprise mashups, but with a twist. James and Michael hit on the apparent fit between mashups and cloud computing as well as Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cloud computing was also front and center at last week’s IBM Impact 2011 event in Las Vegas. IBM announced moves to streamline provisioning of middleware images on cloud nodes. This is an important step. The first cloud applications, with some notable exceptions, were pretty much straightforward number crunching apps — one-trick ponies, if you will. But, increasingly, the apps on the cloud will come to mirror the complexity of “apps on the ground,” ones that use sophisticated middleware. Read all about it in our Impact 2011 show story.

Clearly, the cloud was out in force last week at SearchSOA.com. Alan Earls contributed a piece that looks at the future of midrange legacy systems and the notion of cloud migration. Earls’ effort is posed as a question: “Is it time to migrate your midrange assets to the cloud?” He suggests that the vestigial midrangers are as hard to decipher as mainframes. That and other issues may slow any effort to move the midrange legacy to a new platform.

Can there be such a thing as a private cloud?

Someone raised an interesting question to industry expert Judith Hurwitz. They asked if there really can be such a thing as a private cloud. After all, the “cloudiest thing” about cloud is its massive scalability. If we are talking private and on premise, that naturally confines scalability to the less than massive realm. Hurwitz has an interesting reply to the inquisitive investigator’s query. Yes, Virginia, you can have an elastic private cloud.

Thoughts on Enterprise Architecture

Len Fehskens of The Open Group writes recently that enterprise architecture needs more to be about the whole enterprise — that may mean Enterprise Architecture (EA) may move to the business side. Let’s face it, EA is still largely on the IT side, at this writing.
 
“Enterprise architecture ought to be about the entire enterprise, because that’s what the name implies. If it’s really about IT, it ought to be called enterprise IT architecture,” writes Fehskens in a blog.
 
Fehskens wonders too, if EA will eventually go down in the record book as a ’soft’ discipline or a ‘hard’ discipline. Stay tuned. More to come.

Gartner places IBM at head of middleware crowd

By Ryan Cloutier -

Gartner has named IBM the market leader in the application infrastructure and middleware space. According to Gartner, IBM holds a 32.6 percent market share – nearly double that of its closest competitor. This is the tenth consecutive year that IBM has led in Gartner’s market estimation. The worldwide market for application infrastructure and middleware grew 7.3 % and totals $7.6 billion, while IBM grew 14.4 percent. IBM also holds leadership positions in key submarkets determined to be growing faster than the overall IT field as well as the message-oriented middleware market, the transaction processing monitor market and the combined markets of enterprise service bus suites and integration appliances.

What are emerging cloud computing best practices?

By Alan Earls

What are emerging cloud computing best practices?  According to Jignesh Shah, vice president for Business Infrastructure Products & Solutions at Software AG, one of the emerging best practices is to centralize internal access to all cloud services through a ‘gateway’ or service intermediary. “This results in a single perch that can be used to govern both internal consumers of the service and the third-party provider of the service,” he explains. Continued »

Gosling goes to Google; admits he is sometimes grumpy

Java innovator James Gosling, who left the employ of new Java steward Oracle shortly after its merger with Sun last year, has gone to work for Google, the first company Oracle sued for Java patent infringement.
In a blog entry, Gosling wrote:

Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today.

He contineud:

One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying “no” to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.

In closing, Gosling admitted he was something of, er, a grump.

I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon.

Forrester analysts: SOA still strong

SOA is still going strong. Businesses that already use SOA are expanding their SOA initiatives and new businesses are starting to adopt SOA and to implement SOA technologies. The first-time SOA infrastructure purchase is shifting from ESBs to other technologies. Continued »

Eclipse organization’s browser-based Orion tool gets on-line hub

UPDATED – A JavaScript editor known as Orion uses the browser as the basis for building tools for web developers. While it is an Eclipse Foundation effort, it is said to represent a fully new code base. Now it is available via an online hub. IBM engineers have forged the first bits of Orion. Continued »

Highlights from TheServerSide Java Symposium

The fruits of recent Java community efforts were on display at TheServerSide Java Symposium last week in Las Vegas. There for view were the efforts of people who are maneuvering Java into the next computing era. TSS JS proved that new languages are moving on to the JVM, SOA middleware is moving forward, and the much awaited new JDK is again making progress. Continued »

SOA governance, cloud computing and trust

Governance is one of the essential elements of SOA. It is also one of those aspects of SOA that is likely to come to the fore in cloud computing. Service dependencies that are inherent in composite applications are hard enough to track as it is. There is every reason to believe these dependencies will be just as imprtant to understand and track as appliation move to the cloud architecture, whether that is a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid. Continued »