It may be due to coincidence, shift in attention or in fact a new trend that during my CeBit visit, I found a lot of confirmation for my last post that there is a move from BPM and Java portals towards mashups and Open Social gadgets.
A demonstration of the upcoming IBM product family currently developed under codename Vulcan made it very clear that even the big players are adopting these Web 2.0 standards, although they are also the biggest supports of SOA and the WS-* standard family. The upcoming version of IBM connections is supporting the RESTful protocolActivity Streams and allows for third party applications to report their events to connections, which then displays them in the user’s stream. Once the user clicks on the event in the stream, an Open Social gadget is displayed that shows content from the original application which can include active parts like buttons for approval of documents.
After that I investigated a bit and found a lot of other applications using these Web 2.0 standards and some people are even speaking of WOA, Web-oriented Architecture in contrast to SOA. Among those applications are e.g. the open source DMS nuxeo (one of my favorite OSS packages, due to their innovative developers) and the CMS Magnolia, which is not very popular in Germany but yet absolutely comparable to Typo3, Drupal and all the other well known CM systems.
I’ve also learned that in contrast to my claim in the last post there is in fact a standard that can be seen as the Web 2.0 counterpart of BPML, called EMML for Enterprise Mashup Markup Language. The reason that I wasn’t aware of that seems that its adoption rate seems to be rather small. Only very few products support it and none of them seems very popular. A Wikipedia article provides a very good comparison of portlets and mashups. From my perspective, there is an additional argument: the portlet standards JSR168 and 286 are Java only and I don’t know whether non Java applications can conform to those. In contrast to that, Open Social gadgets only rely on client-side JavaScript, XML, HTML and CSS only, so that any server-side language can be used. Therefore, it is a very promising approach to replace the more complex Java portlets with lightweight Open Social gadgets. A little drop of bitterness is that there are competing standards in the Web 2.0 world. We have W3C widgets and Google Wave gadgets (the latter one can be pronounced dead, I guess) and social portals have to support multiple standards, which is never a good constellation.
So much for now, I’m sure there will be more to report in a few weeks.
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