Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I’m in the keynote for the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit. So far, the biggest thing that the panelists have mentioned is this overlay on the traditional Gartner hype cycle which defines things as in the “Zone of Competitive Leadership (ZCL),” the “Zone of the Mainstream (ZM),” and the “Zone of the Decline (ZD).” If not apparent, things that are in the ZCL are higher risk but higher reward. Things that are in the ZM are necessary for companies to adopt to simply keep up with their competitors. Things that are in ZD are for the most risk averse. Yefim Natis put Client-Server architectures in the Zone of Decline, as an example.Yefim also called out that this coming year, “Interactive” SOA (which is Gartner’s “traditional” SOA) will move into the Zone of the Mainstream. I’ll have to go back and look up what their definition of interactive SOA is, but unless it’s just the standard integration-based approach to building the same old solutions, I’d be hesitant to say that SOA is mainstream. Using services where we were previously using EJBs or other distributed components clearly is mainstream at this point, but until we see more projects that are strictly about building services and a separation between the construction of consumers and the construction of services, I think we’re still in the ZCL.Yefim also talked about other types of SOA, including Event-Driven SOA, WOA, and Context-based SOA, which he’ll cover in a later session. There was then some brief discussion about the SOA platform, and now we’ve moved onto a discussion from Gene Phifer about Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Computing as a Service, Social Networking, etc. It’s nice to hear them giving a decent amount of attention to this. Nothing new in the quick overview, but keynote-level attention is a good thing.Finally, Matthew Hotle is wrapping up with a discussion about governance. They’re emphasizing a very lightweight approach, with just enough decision support to ensure that the organization can still be agile. There’s a session on their Maturity Assessment for Application Development later in the day that I plan on attending. From what they showed in the keynote, it’s a five level maturity approach that sounds very similar to what I’ve discussed in the past (here, here).More to come from the conference, I hope to be blogging throughout.