In-the-Clouds-with-SOA-XML-and-the-Open-Web

Once in a while, a confluence of random events (or not so random, depending on your belief system) can create the ideal aha! moment. The moment of clarity when all the pieces just fall into place and you realize "that's what's going on!" I believe I have had one of those moments. And if this thought has any basis in reality, it could mean that everything we have seen in IT is about to make a huge change.

TCG Advisors envisions a new computing model for when the inter-enterprise becomes the basis of all IT infrastructure. Where can we expect the most change? All the action is going to be in the middle [layer] in preparation for a significant change at the top in about five years. We are all [preparing] for a new business model: the inter-enterprise network value chain. For the inter-enterprise network value chain, traditional business applications need to be re-architected so they can cross company boundaries. When people look at this re-architecting, they see two huge barriers: the middleware, because our software doesn't work this way, and the business process layer, because people don't have a lot of experience [with it]. There will be a fair amount of trial and error before we figure this out. Even thought leaders are struggling.

The goal has been managing information. We're shifting from managing information to managing processes. Information is an important attribute in process management, but it's not the goal. So trying to turn data into information is the wrong way to look at the problem. What we are trying now is to manage processes across multiple states, where any portion of the process can be in multiple states. So you have to keep state - which is a computing idea - and you have to coordinate actions among self-managing logic. That's the service-oriented architecture paradigm.

What service-oriented architectures let you do is recombine - they are like Legos - to make all kinds of innovations out of the existing components of the world. This is very productive. If you're stuck in a client/server system you can't participate in that.

Microsoft is showing off one more facet of its once-hidden intellectual property. On Tuesday, it placed the preliminary technical specifications for XAML—the Extensible Application Markup Language—under its Open Specification Promise, or OSP.The technical documentation will enable third parties to implement XAML formats in their client, server and tool products. It includes both the 2006 implementation of Microsoft’s XAML object mapping specification and the vocabulary specification for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). A spokesperson said that the final XAML documentation would be published by June 30.XAML is a declarative XML-based language used to define data binding, events and UI elements in WPF and Silverlight applications, and to define workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation.

An industry coalition that has represented competitors of Microsoft in European markets before the European Commission stepped up its public relations offensive this morning, this time accusing Microsoft of scheming to upset HTML's place in the fabric of the Internet with XAML, an XML-based layout lexicon for network applications.

The "race to the bottom" is a familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance. In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't comply.1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many competing versions of HTML exist. At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor, XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML 1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions' capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions. Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in XHTML 1.1. Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top 100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in widespread use.

Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.

Cloud providers and mainstay enterprise software vendors could make sweeter WOA plus SOA music together. They may not have a choice. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, there will be a huge push for Microsoft Oriented Architecture that will double-down on “software plus services.” And MSFT combined with Yahoo would have an awful lot in place to work from — from the device and PC client, to the server farm, business applications, developer tools and communities, and ramp-up of global cloud/content/user metadata resources. I think Microsoft already understands the power of WOA plus SOA.

The cloud that can manage data in way that allows both user-level and process-level access, with granular permissioning — and allows CXOs to feel good about it all — gets the gold ring. The cloud business is a 50-year business.

OOXML on the other hand presents ISO with a very different situation. Because of the way the OOXML - Ecma charter is worded, i don't see how ISO JTC-1 could ever fix the OOXML interoperability problems. ISO approval of OOXML would include acceptance of a charter that defines and limits OOXML interoperability to whatever MSOffice determines it to be. If Patrick and the JTC-1 tried to bring OOXML into compliance with existing ISO Interoperability Requirements, they would have to somehow amend a charter duly approved.Given that the JTC-1 has yet to address a two year old ISO directive regarding ODF interop compliance, what are the odds they will dare to amend an approved charter? Not good i think.ISO approval of OOXML is a tragedy for all of us. For sure it's the end of ODF. It's perhaps the end of ISO as a respected standards organization. The issue of open standards itself will become a joke, with the reality of standards by corporation having us all wringing our hands in despair.

The Microsoft Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) technical documentation set provides preliminary technical specifications for this language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) that enables developers to specify a hierarchy of objects.

It’ll be cheaper to put apps in the cloud than to run them on your own servers: “It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom … Somebody who is selling [business] apps is going to build in, more than likely, the underlying utility costs within their higher-level service. It will still be cheaper to do those things on a service infrastructure than it is on a server infrastructure.” Taken together, these statements — by the company’s chief strategy officer, no less — add up to a huge strategic shift under way within Microsoft. They suggest that, in five years’ time, the company will be unrecognizable compared to today, with services revenues taking a significant share while licence revenues dwindle.

OM MALIK: You outlined Microsoft’s software-plus-services strategy, but what I want to know about is the changing role of the desktop in this service’s future. RAY OZZIE: I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge. A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?

We're going to talk about dynamic documents. That is to say, documents that have form and structure and that are things end-users are very familiar with and have been using for generations, but with a twist. That's the ability to bring content and data, on a dynamic lifecycle basis, in and out of these documents in a managed way. That’s one area.The second area is service-oriented architecture (SOA), the means to automate and reuse assets across multiple application sets and data sets in a large complex organization.We're seeing these two areas come together. Structured documents and the lifecycle around structured authoring tools come together to provide an end-point for the assets and resources managed through an SOA, but also providing a two-way street, where the information and data that comes in through end-users can be reused back in the SOA to combine with other assets for business process benefits.

Thus far we’ve been talking about the notion of unstructured content as a target source to SOA-based applications, but you can also think about this from the perspective of the end application itself -- the document as the endpoint, providing a framework for bringing together structured data, transactional data, relational data, as well as unstructured content, into a single document that comes to life.Let me back up and give you a little context on this. You mentioned the various documents that line workers, for example, need to utilize and consume as the basis for their jobs. Documents have unique value. Documents are portable. You can download a document locally, attach it to an email, associate it with a workflow, and share it into a team room. Documents are persistent. They exist over a period of time, and they provide very rich context. They're how you bring together disparate pieces of information into a cohesive context that people can understand.

ISO is bound to the business of "interoperability", and has very strict guidelines for interoperability requirements, that are themselves tied to international trade agreements and legal conventions. In this context, it is beyond surprising that ISO allows the "OASIS PAS" and "Ecma Fast Track" channels to remain open, with specification work remaining under the controlling influence of the vendors.IMHO, the change in Patrick's position is entirely due to the realization that it is impossible to map between OOXML and ODF. I don't know this for sure, but when i read the German Standards Group (DIN) report on harmonization, authorized by the EU-IDABC and provided to ISO, i couldn't help but wonder how Patrick would react. The report definitively ends his OOXML ODF mapping dream.