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• Expanding the Influence of Content Management with Business Service Management
• Breaking down the silos: from change process to release automation

The web as we
knew it in 1995 has already largely died. Out of the ashes has arisen a second
incarnation and we are currently on the verge of a new reality, Web 2.0. While
there is no one definition, Web 2.0 is perhaps best described as the migration
to the web as a platform spanning all connected devices, coupled with a
specific set of patterns. Web 2.0 has many components, but it is generally
associated with a class of web applications that harness the intelligence,
data, and actions of their users to create value (iconic Web 2.0 applications
include Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon). While many are looking to Web 2.0 to
solve the problems of yesteryear, the mass migration is creating a new set of
problems that must be addressed.

This article
is divided into three parts: an analysis of the web today, an analysis of what
has already died or is dying, and a look forward at aspects of Web 2.0 that are
creating problems and will likely die in the next five years.

Microsoft is investing some of the top engineering talent at the company to make two key investments:



• Deliver a world class SOA platform across client, server, and cloud. Microsoft has been a thought leader in Web services and SOA technologies since the very beginning and has delivered industry leading technologies such as the Windows Communication Foundation and BizTalk Server.
• Deliver a world class and mainstream modeling platform that helps the roles of IT collaborate and enables better integration between IT and the business. The modeling platform enables higher level descriptions, so called declarative descriptions, of the application.

Executive Summary

As the market for content management technology continues to grow, so too do the ways in which organizations seek to use content management. What began as a market focused on web content management has grown to include document management, digital asset management, and records management. What has emerged along with this growth is a desire by vendors to provide a broad, enterprise-class platform of content management technology that can handle all kinds of content.

simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft's attempt to turn operating system and proprietary services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It's the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It's bold, brilliant and downright scary.

Microsoft has identified the right problem, synchronization, but applied a self-serving solution.

Live Mesh brings that to life, as product director Mike Zintel explains on the brand new Live Mesh blog:

“[It] blend[s] the web, Windows and other computing endpoints in a way that preserves the ‘it just works’ feel of the web with seamless integration into my common workflows. The coolest thing about Live Mesh is how it smashes the abrupt mental switch that I have to make today as I move between being ‘on the web’ and ‘in an application’.”

At first glance, that may seem a perfectly reasonable and innocuous statement — and indeed it is, if you take a Web-centric view of the world — but coming out of Microsoft, it’s dynamite. Instead of seeing the Web as an extension of the desktop, it includes the desktop as part of the continuum of the Web. Where then does the application sit? Not on the desktop, or on any identifiable server machine, but simply in the mesh. In other words, it becomes a service, capable of running anywhere in the cloud, including on the desktop.

“The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations) …”

“At the core of Mesh is [the] concept of a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses.

So, true, WOA, isn’t an architecture, it’s a webby style of apps and integration, of mashups and open APIs, of using REST and RIA clients, all from a variety of Internet sources. It’s integration as a service, too. These can all be composited, accessed and managed by an enterprise’s internal SOA, or not. The services can come from a cloud, public or private. Forrester says the growth curve for Enterprise 2.0 is steep, but I think it will be even steeper.

These webby assets could just as well come together as portals, standalone Web apps, SaaS, or RIA front ends for composited ecology services that support extended enterprise processes. The point is there’s no need to wait.

rapid ramp-up of services hybrids — of public/private clouds, services ecologies, internal and external hosting, social enterprise media tools, mashups in myriad forms, integration of services regardless of origins or types of aggregation.

You can today begin a business online and scale it without an IT department, or an on-premises datacenter. You just can.

CXF is really designed for high performance, kind of like a request-response style of interaction for one way, asynchronous messaging, and things like that. But it’s really designed for taking data in from a variety of transports and message formats, such as SOAP or just raw XML. If you bring in the Apache Yoko project, we have CORBA objects coming in off the wire. It basically processes them through the system as quickly as possible with very little memory and processing overhead. We can get it to the final destination of where that data is supposed to be, whether it’s off to another service or a user-developed code, whether it’s in JavaScript or JAX-WS/JAXB code.

That’s the goal of what the CXF runtime is — just get that data into the form that the service needs, no matter where it came from and what format it came from in, and do that as quickly as possible.