Glue Blog

I know it seems that things have been quiet over here at Glue lately - but its a myth (a myth, I say)!

Behind the scenes, we’ve been digging through all of the groundwork that will help us to give you an incredible conference — and one of the early first pieces is done: dates.

Mark your calendars: Glue will be May 12-13, 2009 in Denver, Colorado!

Obviously, things will only continue to ramp up from here - stay tuned.

Yahoo!, knowing a good thing when they see it, has decided to name their new offering after the Glue conference.

I kid, of course, but only slightly.

Yahoo’s “Glue pages” does touch on the underpinning of the idea behind the Glue conference - namely, that once the web becomes the platform (check), the next major task is to integrate all of the web architecture we’ve built — including search results. Accordingly, Glue pages:

…will leverage the Yahoo application platform…in coming months,” Kelly said, though today it doesn’t yet. “We will eventually open it up, so developers could develop customized search results for Glue Pages the way we’re doing it for Search Monkey.”

Turning search into a platform is a good idea. Giving people a means to “glue” that together with whatever they want is an even better idea - and it cuts through the “closed” nature of so much of today’s web-oriented architecture.

Between Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Yahoo!’s Glue pages, we’ve now got two of the “big boys” (who were almost one) acknowledging what we’re all about over here. And that’s a good thing.

Brian Oberkirch is one of my favorite bloggers. This morning Brian decided to take on identity and “glue” in a blog post. Brian writes of gluing things together via identity in a personal sense, but its got me thinking about Glue in an enterprise sense.

First, some quotes:

“Forgive me for thinking there isn’t a whole lot of life in lifestreams.  Dumb rivers of updates are a stop gap, surely better than what we had before (no centralized method for keeping watch) but not a durable solution for user or service value.  These dim aggregations cloak beautiful seams. “

And:

“What’s interesting about our current round of science projects is the glue that holds them together.

Or, rather, what you could do if you started to really think about the various forms of data glue you could give your users.  Post It Notes use weak adhesive to make your information surface mobile and the medium more plastic.  Let’s not get hung up on form factors, but intstead look to the deeper needs this rash of feature copying is trying to meet. “

And:

“By fixating on one or two specific types of data views (status messages, ‘life’ streams) we miss the larger point.  Adam Greenfield isn’t wrong when he notes that our current social software offerings are weak simulacra of the rich interplay we enjoy in our ‘real’ lives.  We aren’t going to give people richer experiences by mimicking a narrow range of interface ideas. “

The “grand problem” of Glue (in the enterprise sense) is that as “the web as platform,” “cloud computing,” and “everything as a service” move into the enterprise (a move that is starting, but will obviously take *years*), the “architects” that have to deal with that (and I mean architect to include marketers as well as IT folk) are going to struggle mightily with how it is they simplify, manage and reuse all of the stove-piped stuff that lives in different web applications.

The “seams” are the problem and the opportunity.

The “information surface” will no longer be living in large enterprise software suites.

The “end result” will resemble the weak and tenuous ties of real life networks more than the strong-armed structures of current IT architectures.

Glue, the conversation and conference, will be about those elements. I can’t wait.

There’s an interesting article out today detailing how two Gartner analysts believe that windows is “collapsing” - both under the weight of its own legacy code, but also (and more importantly) because people are increasingly using “OS-agnostic applications.” One account of the Gartner presentation says that the analysts believe that all OS applications have moved on to the web by 2011.

 We, of course, wouldn’t argue the point. The truth is that the browser is the new desktop, and the web is the new PC (heck, that’s not even new - that’s been true for years). The problem now is that existing vendors like Microsoft will have to adjust to what that radical change means. But even more so, new opportunities arrive in how it is that we can begin to integrate all of these “OS-agnostic applications.” And, by the way, having Google host all of those OS apps is *not* the answer.

 The collapse of “windows” leads to a lot of broken stuff that we have to glue back together. 

Dana Gardner has an interesting post about how “web oriented architecture” may be closing the window on the opportunity that is “service oriented architecture.” In it, he hints at the idea that SOA is an extension of the EAI (enterprise application integration) of the late 90s, while WOA is the new and fertile ground in enterprise IT architecture.

Obviously, over here at Glue, we agree. In fact, one of the ideas behind Glue is that WOA is not only “eclipsing” other architectures, but that the big problem of EAI is happening all over again. EAI basically tried to “glue” together applications behind a firewall on a corporate network (and gave rise to a great many of the “suites” - like identity management suites - that we see today).

As WOA creeps into the enterprise, the integration (read: gluing together) of those apps becomes a ginormous problem once again. And that is one huge Glue thread.

Welcome to Glue! Glue is a conference (and blog) about the idea that now that the web is the platform, enterprise IT folks are faced with a problem similar to the enterprise application integration hell they faced in the late 90’s. Namely, integrating web applications; or more correctly, loosely coupling, abstracting and sharing  the data, process and workflow that is common to those applications. Some folks have described the idea as “Interop for the Web.” Others have called it “web oriented architecture.” No matter what you call it, we hope to be a resource for these ideas.

So, first questions first: When is Glue? Well, that’s the thing. We haven’t decided yet. We’ve set this site up well in advance of when we plan to have the conference (early 09) because we want to gather your feedback. Glue will be sometime in early 2009. In the meantime, we’ll be looking for every way possible to engage with people (architects, integrators, vendors, etc) around the ideas that make up Glue.

And what are those ideas? The categories are a bit fluid, but so far, we’ve identified the following:

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!