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.

A little while ago, we had the great pleasure of hosting a chapter excerpt from modernization mavens William M. Ulrich and Philip H. Newcomb. If you want a quick view on modernization pitfalls and strategies, their book on systems transformation is an excellent place to start. Meanwhile, some other of our recent coverage on this topic has been aggregated in our special report on mainframe application modernization.

Cloud computing on one level is a variation on grid computing, a technology this site began to cover about 10 years ago. APIs are where the pedal meets the metal in the cloud, and we looked at these in a Cloud API mini-roundup a while back. Meanwhile, the data requirements of today’s cloud projects appear to be quite novel, and they are the area of interest for quite a few services architects these days. Last week, SearchSOA.com’s James Denman uncovered some useful resources on the graph database, one of the extra tools in the NoSQL movement which is poised as an alternative to the traditional relational database in cloud and other apps.

It wasn’t too long ago that EAI and SOA pioneer David Linthicum discussed Web data services and distributed computing with us. Sometimes the rush to cloud belies the role services play. Linthicum’s discussion is an antidote to that. Also, after a bit of hiatus, expert Michael Ogrinz has checked in with a very interesting look at data mashups that employ government data services. It is another take on the emerging realm of data services, discussing tools and techniques and using a ready example.

Ease of set-up is one of the major benefits here. Business users have the wherewithal now to create executable models that also serve as UI builders for executive dashboards that provide a view of operations. But IT and development remain a bottleneck for actual installation of the real-time run-time versions of the systems the business creates. The public cloud is a place where the systems can get built-out, ahead of IT procurement of private cloud or on-premise versions.

Collaboration is a cornerstone of recent BPM add-ons, whether cloud-based or other. Tibco’s new offering highlights collaboration, or the social media aspect of business intelligence, which the cloud should leverage somewhat.

Among other activity in this area is Metastorm’s new M3 modeling suite, which is composed of a popular subset of its modeling tools for business process building, residing on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Not far afield of this is a new app store builder included in JackBe’s Presto 3.0 enterprise mashup engine, used in many cases for data analytics.

Enter the asynchronous architecture. Ajax especially proved to provide just enough power to drive Web applications forward. At heart is the assumption that connectivity is not absolute.  Clients exhibit some autonomy.

As more and more software applications are delivered as Web applications, software architects are still learning the merits of the asynchronous. They are still learning and arguing the implications as the underlying tools change – one of these being HTML5.

Dion Almaer discusses HTML5, and its possible effect on computer design, in a recent blog on Ajaxian.com. He suggests a more client centric design maybe near.

”A lot of code we will be rewritten and changed for ‘HTML5ication,’ which is an opportunity for a change in how things are done,” he writes in ”The march to a more client-centric Web: Will the mobile Web HTML5 and Chrome Web apps be the tipping point?” A long march and a long title that! Check it out!

Of course the first era of up-from-the-underground application development was not all good. Lotus 1-2-3 and Visual Basic in the wrong hands could cause grief when it was time to scale up.  Lotus Notes and Powerbuilder were capable of some departmental gems, but without the professional’s hand, many early client-server applications could wreak havoc. There goes a runaway query!

Still, with their faults, these PC-centric tool sets brought in some fresh air. Some people suggest some more such fresh air may waft our way on the winds of enterprise mashups, The front-end tools that connect to data sources in a way assumedly nimbler than the portal server methods that came about with Java.

John Pyke of Business Process Management (BPM) specialist Cordys sees some such change in the wind. ”I think we are getting to a tipping point in the way software is assembled and deployed,” he recently told us. ”A combination of process, SOA and mashups is going to be in the vanguard.”

For its part, Corsys appears to be in the vanguard of the vanguard here. The company joined the Google Enterprise Partner program in an effort to bring structured workflow techniques to the Google Apps productivity software suite. The goal is to combine the best aspects of Cordys Process Factory with the Google Apps Premier Edition. It could, maintains Pyke, form an alternative to Microsoft’s BizTalk or Windows Workflow Foundation that hook into the Office software suite.

Process is important, or mashups become a mess, like some of the less stellar moments back in the ‘anyone-can-do-it’ client-server tool days.

”If you are going to put these tools in the hands of end users to build situational applications, you still needs some kind of compliance or tracking activity around it. Otherwise, it’s all mayhem,” said Pyke.

”People mash things up together and they forget about the process side of it,’’ he said. That’s where BPM comes in.

Of course, the momentum around iPhone and other smart phone apps enforces the enterprise mashup cause.

Asks Pyke playfully: ”Who is going ever again to build a Windows app?”

”You are going to build to a browser,” he says, answering the question.

With a bit of irony, he states: ”The last great Windows application may be Google Earth.”

That may prove to be a bit of stretch. Still, if successful, the well-tempered enterprise mashup may bode the end of apps as we know them.

Integrating with the Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio, Sparx’s new Enterprise Architect 7.5 introduces editions aimed at the business community, software developers and systems/hardware designers. The software can generate code from UML behavioral and rule-based models, and it can generate BPEL from BPMN 1.1 models. It includes profiles and plug-ins covering DoDAF, TOGAF and MODAF. The software supports a variety of UML profiles including one that addresses ‘business motivation’ modeling, an OMG-backed approach intended to meld software development with business objectives. The tool is as much a communications tool as it is a design tool, says one end user.

In building larger business processes, you may need for example to deal with managed file transfers. In this case you might look at BPM modeling software capable of managing FTP systems. Such software is described in a recent article by SearchSOA.com’s Lauren Kelly in ”Metastorm BPM engine said to give process owners more control.”

Simplification is the underlying trend in BPM modeling today. But the goal is not simply to allow business users to more readily map their processes. Anyone can benefit from easier modeling. SearchSOA.com covered the issue in ”Active Endpoints, Seros in deal to orchestrate BPM and push SOA.”

Simplification at the service level is bubbling up among a slew of modeling trends. Among new technologies that may help are UML-based SoaML tools. SoaML seeks to define a metamodel for the service interfaces with which developers work. It maintains compatibility with UML and BPMN. It seeks to further the long-standing Web services goal of creating useful contracts between services.

SOA fatigue may be traced to aspects of SOA that people have sometimes rightly described as bloated. For SOA repositories and SOA governance the jury is still out.

People have yet to conclude how much is too much and what is the right mix of best design practice and ‘good-enough to ship’ development push for organizations that are – let’s face it – in the business to make apps that save or make money.

From days of old we know about project bloat – isn’t it fair to say we have to watch out for SOA bloat? Simple SOA should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Yet, it should not become Super SOA – super-sized and expensive. Being too infrastructure-oriented and too far removed from killer apps with big ROI – that is sure to cause disenchantment.

The impression has grown only more stark in recent weeks as bloggers, sites, and magazines have begun to press the idea of Small SOA, or more recently, WOA, or Web-Oriented Architecture, to the detriment of Super SOA. That could be a good thing.

Sometimes people are too quick to assign ‘bloat’ and too quick as well to pretend a lighter version of middleware architecture is going to solve all problems. Yet, it is true that things can grow beyond common sense proportion.

What all this chatter belies is that Services and Architecture are the important parts of SOA. The goal is to build the right app, make sure it works, and ensure it will fit with other apps. Architects and developers in organizations are using that services approach. It is not a product, and it is not magic. It is a way to do work.

We are just reaching the moment when many of SOA initiatives are going live full time. Did everyone ‘get it right?’ Probably not. Is that a reason to run from SOA? No.

SOA was no magic bullet. Neither is WOA. Is this an interesting time? Yep.

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture – Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM – Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure – Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups – Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA – Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services – Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development – Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.

It creates a serverside runtime for RESTful services. The browser-based development tools allow for REST-based components to be exposed via Ajax with the Dojo toolkit. McGee said the goal of the project had been to create a simple, intuitive component model for developers looking to create RESTful services. There is a developer guide, which goes into the nitty-gritty on runtime management, RSS/ATOM support, REST API documention, configuring data access and dozens of other topics.

Some good news for those looking to do more with REST development is that sMash won’t be a standalone REST offering inside the Big Blue product ocean.

“We look at REST enablement as a core capability across the IBM portfolio,” said Kareem Yusuf, director of product development for WebSphere sMash. WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo made the same vow, promising that REST support will be driven across IBM’s platforms, particularly on the SOA front.

“We’re systematically going through our product line and REST-enabling everything from MQ to CICS, DB2, WebSphere Application Server and on and on. This liberates these products and the content they represent to the Web,” Cuomo said. “With all that content dangling out on the Web, programmers can now agilely write new applications by interacting with those programs.”

Using sMASH coders can mashup content and then deploy it as a Web application, he explained. Mashups developed with the Project Zero technology also lend themselves to being hosted in a Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, Cuomo said.

“So Zero as a service is the next thing on the horizon,” he added.

The scripting language support should lower the barriers to entry for developers looking to try sMash.

“It’s not a new language people have to learn,” McGee said.

A limited community version will be available through the Project Zero website and the full version, with support, will be available on a license model.

For a developer level take, check out the TSS.com discussion of the sMash release.

Joining sMash in the Web 2.0 offering mix is a new product called IBM Mashup Center, designed for non-technical line of business users. It combines Lotus Mashups technology on the front end with the InfoSphere MashupHub on the back end. Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web interaction hubs at Lotus, said the product is designed to put mashup technology in the hands of knowledge workers, enabling them to pull information out of enterprise applications (like ERP and CRM) and combine that with market data and other 3rd party applications.

“The differentiator is we know where all that information is at,” Bowden said, noting that mashup development has become a hotbed for venture capital investment.

A visual wizard tool will allow users to create RESTful services and widgets without having to know specific programming languages.

In all we received 395 responses and 44% said rich Internet applications were part of their enterprise IT/business strategy. Another 30% reported that RIA would become part of that strategy in 2008. 85% reported that RIA was an important to extremely important piece of their SOA strategy. Only 2% said RIA wasn’t important at all to their SOA plans.
Most strikingly, 74% reported they expect the importance of RIA to their IT/business goals to increase this year. In other words, for 3/4 of our survey respondents, RIA is a big deal that will be getting bigger. Rich Web front ends were the most popular type of app being built or planned (79%), with Ajax (81%) being the most popular technology employed to build those apps. Yet 55% also reported they are building/planning database composite applications and 35% reported they have entered or will enter the fairly new space of enterprise mashups. That’s a fairly massive amount for a category that would have been in the low single digits two years ago.

Oddly, mobile apps only drew a 29% response rate. That could be read a few different ways. Our respondents were mostly senior folks in the app dev or IT department. It’s possible rich mobile development is being done outside their auspices. Yet the fact that the more senior people in the app dev arena aren’t connected to it would also mean that rich mobile development hasn’t become a major enterprise initiative. The other way to read it is that mobile devices have yet to become a major business initiative. In fact, mashups using unified communications might be the path that mobile devices take rather than strict mobile app development.

The top two benefits sought by those building out rich/composite apps were improving the user experience for customer facing apps/services (65%) and providing expected levels of business functionality to end users (61%). Lack of internal knowledge/resources ranked as the number one obstacle to adopting Web 2.0 technologies (21%). It also ranked high as a secondary issue (35%). Yet a whole host of issues fell in the 27-38% range for secondary issues: techinical readiness/back-end support, selecting the right technologies, security, data/application integration issues and application performance issues.

Finally, IT management ranked as the top evangelist (28%), technical decision maker (34%) and financial decision maker (40%) when it comes to Web 2.0 technologies. Yet an interesting person ranked second in evangelism (27%) and technical decision making (26%) – the architect. Maybe this has something to do with polling the membership of an SOA site, but it speaks to how architecture is becoming a primary concern in all applications work these days.

It should be remembered that for years analysts have been saying that a primary benefit of pursuing SOA is to get ready for whatever comes next, to be able to deploy new technologies on top of the existing IT infrastructure in a way that makes sense. It would seem from our survey that those predictions are now taking shape in reality. RIA is happening parallel to and in conjunction with SOA and it looks like many users will have interesting stories to tell later in the year.