Archive for February, 2010

Web Widgets

// February 27th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // strategy, web development

I been thinking a lot lately, should I invest some time into creating an AIR widget/application or focus on what I know best.

Selecting parts of a Web site and it’s data and packaging it up to make it run inside a portable, user distributable widget has been growing more and more popular over the last few years. For example, WidgetBox currently distributes 74,000 different kinds of Web widgets from its partners to over 1.2 million other sites.  Widgets lets users distribute a Web site to other places on the Web at no extra cost and it also creates an ecosystem effect, where other Web sites users become the users of the new site.  The YouTube badge is a notoriously well-known example of this that also helped drive the extraordinarily fast growth of the site.  Like APIs, widgets are now considered a mandatory must-have for new and existing online products. But unlike APIs where it’s up to the API users, figuring out users want out of your site’s widgets is still an art form.

I also find that the Web development industry has been slow to change, particularly outside the valley, and there is depressingly scarce information on how to deliver well on things like widgets, open APIs, social networking applications, and even syndication.  So, what do you guys think I should do?

Enterprise Mashups, do we really need them?

// February 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // web development

Over the last few months I have learned that a lot of my thoughts on Enterprise Mashups were wrong. As I consulted the company that invented the first Enterprise Mashup Platform, “Presto” they were certain that they had all of the right answers to the question of ‘what is an enterprise Mashup and what kind of value do they create?’.

Most cognoscenti consider their opinions to be relatively unassailable when it comes to the topic on which they are experts. So, as the saying goes, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing you have one. I knew that we didn’t have the best answers, so I set out on a journey to discover better ways to share the mashup story through definitions, use cases and the like. We set out on what I called a “mash-about” (named after the aboriginal “walk-about”).

I tried to simplify the definition as much as possible so I can focus on what I thought were the four most important elements:

  • Secure – I’ve written about the common secure requirements for mashups before. Without this set of capabilities, you’ll never get past the enterprise front door.
  • Visually rich – Mashups can certainly be published as a data service using a format like RSS or WSDL. But I’ve found that they more often end as visual representations (often personalized or customized by the mashup consumer) that lets users better understand the data and make informed decisions.
  • Actionable – The dictionary defines “actionable” as “relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken”. We’re talking about data that a knowledge worker can understand and which doesn’t require lots of processing.
  • Internal and external – Mashups provide aggregation and manipulation of information from many sources (inside and outside the firewall). Many people wrongly assume that they focus on one or the other when in practice they are typically a mix of both.

So, I gathered my thoughts to essentially define “WHY?” (do I or anyone else really need an Enterprise Mashup)?

I think poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Sure, Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand, but does everyone need one?

Designer/Developer, what am I? Kinda both really.

// February 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // rambling, web development

For those that are in the industry, know that Adobe had their Refresh 2010 last week. Well, from what I can see the industry, thanks to a number of companies including Adobe and Microsoft, has moved into skill segmentation—Designers and Developers—and you have every right to expect these guys to understand each other because they will be working in a collaborative environment. A Developer needs to understand what the Designer does, and his or her unique language, and vice versa. Post Secondary education, on the other hand, produces either one or the other because… that is what we do. They “train up” specialists that are either really great designers or amazing coders. The students spend a few years learning their craft in a rather cloistered environment and are rarely exposed to the skills of the other person in the equation. Which begs the question: Do design schools need to expose their students to code in a digital universe, and do code-centric schools need to introduce a design element into their way of doing things?

This isn’t a frivolous question. Adobe and Microsoft are developing some amazing tools that are slowly but surely moving what we do from the browser to the desktop. They are leading the charge into a web universe that is “rich” in every sense of the word and, as devices take hold, you can bet that your clients are going to start asking why you are charging them twice to develop a web application and another version for a mobile phone. We are living in an industry where “Standards”, “Ajax”, “Flex”, and “Spry” are neither adjectives nor cleaning products. While all of this is going on in your day-to-day business, educators are having real issues keeping up with you, let alone addressing the “Designer/Developer” question.

How they resolve it, though, has the potential of becoming a huge issue because students coming out of the universities have a skill set that sometimes doesn’t meet your current needs, and most likely won’t be able to meet your future needs either. I can see that there is a growing disconnect between the skills being taught in the classroom and the skills you need to possess in the “real world”. Don’t get me wrong, I am pointing out our experience not to rub it in your faces, but to get you thinking. What do you guys think should universities do for an industry that is also figuring out how this collaborative/multidisciplinary approach to Designer/Developer workflow fits into their business models?