Alex Barnett blog : webservices

Platform Thinking

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:41:00 GMT

(am republishing this blog post as it automagically disappeared in a server upgrade I did recently, originally posted 13.10.2011)

Last night I came across a rant from a Google employee (that was accidentally made public via Google+...doh!,) that provided not only good popcorn munching material, but I thought had some pretty interesting insights around what it really means to be a "Platform" company, not just a "Product" company.

It's pretty dense stuff, but wanted to call out the snippet about the "mandate" that Jeff Bezos sent around the company back in 2002.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

then...

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon’s vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street.

...Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they’re not supposed to trust external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.

At this point they don’t even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they’re still afraid of that; it’s pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they’ve come to understand that it’s the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it’s the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.

Nowadays, it might be considered conventional wisdom for "Platform Thinking", but to truly embracing this philosophy - and make it real - first requires the realization that in the long term, Platform companies beat Product companies every time. Realizing that, then Platform Thinking and Platform Doing should become second nature. The brilliance of Bezos was to realize this strategic insight long before web APIs became as popular as they have become.

Connecting Clouds: Intuit Partner Platform and Windows Azure

alexbarnett — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:33:00 GMT

How about I break my blogging “hiatus” by sharing some cool stuff the Intuit Partner Platform team has been working on for a little while that involves Windows Azure?

OK, then… :-)

This morning, Intuit and Microsoft have announced very cool news for Intuit and Microsoft developers and for Small Businesses…

From the IPP team blog post, Alex Chriss, Director of IPP (er…my boss):

“Today, we’re thrilled to announce an alliance between Intuit and Microsoft that brings IPP a giant step closer to our ecosystem vision. Starting today, SaaS developers can access the beta of the Windows Azure SDK for IPP - a set of tools, code samples, and services, designed to make it easy for developers of SaaS applications developed on Windows Azure to federate those SaaS apps on to IPP and sell them to millions of Small Businesses in the Intuit Workplace App Center.”

Connecting these two clouds has been fun and it’s just the start…the bits we’re releasing today is a beta…but fully functional: it provides everything an Azure developer needs to federate their apps on to IPP. In the v1.0 release of the Windows Azure SDK for IPP (expected to launch sometime in February) will also include built-in support for IPP’s Intuit Data Services, the web API that allows those SaaS apps to fully integrate with QuickBooks customer data and program against the common data model and cloud repository that all Intuit Workplace App Center leverage…this is how the SaaS apps from different vendors as well as Intuit’s SaaS offerings work together at the data level.

So the developer story is pretty awesome.

The other aspect to the news released this morning is about the plan to federate Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) on to IPP and become one of the great set of apps available on Intuit Workplace App Center. BPOS includes a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.

I recorded a short interview with Jeff Collins, Group Architect for IPP, and Jarred Keneally, Developer Support Engineer to talk about what’s in the SDK and what’s coming soon. Enjoy!

Some more info links:

Official Press Release at Microsoft.com
IPP Team blog post: Intuit Partner Platform + Windows Azure = Win for Small Businesses
IPP Dev Center – Windows Azure SDK for IPP
Intuit Workplace App Center

Update - some reactions to the news coming in now:

Dennis Howlett - ZDNet - Intuit and Microsoft partner: more PaaS to put in your aaS environment

My take: Intuit is joining a growing band of apps vendors that see PaaS as a way of delivering all sorts of aaS functionality, expanding its reach, developing deep domain expertise and helping it accelerate growth. These are bold ambitions and fit well with the idea that a single cloud platform should provide the ecosystem framework needed to achieve these goals. There is no reason why the SMB market should not benefit from these initiatives so at this level it is good to see both Microsoft and Intuit step up to the plate of opening up access to a large group of developers.

Ben Kepes - CloudAve - Intuit and Microsoft Sign Deal to Serve SMBs

"This really is massive news for anyone involved in small or medium business – be it as a business themselves or in anyway selling technology products or services to SMBs....APIs are great – wonderfully valuable things that allow applications to work together. But a common data model of the sort that the IPP is built around, is even better, allowing applications to be built from the start around an underlying and consistent model of data."

Sam Diaz - Between The Lines - Microsoft and Intuit become cloud partners

"The idea, of course, is to link Microsoft’s business applications to the financial data that’s found within Quickbooks to help businesses operate more efficiently. For months, Intuit has been working to push the cloud and open its arms to developers....In July, Intuit launched an open-source community where users could share information to enhance the apps on Intuit’s platform. Prior to that, the company announced Federated Applications, which allows developers to use any programming language, host those apps on any cloud infrastructure and connect them to Intuit’s platform, marketing them to business customers who use Intuit products."

Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft partners with Intuit to shore up Redmond's small-business cloud play

“Customers don’t want a one-point small-business solution. They want a whole suite,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Developer & Platform Evangelism. He said that this kind of partnership with Intuit was an example of how Microsoft plans to address the needs of small-business developers and customers.”

Dave Rosenberg, CNET,

“According to Alex Chriss, director of IPP, the technology took just a few months to build because the strategy was already aligned. The integration is based on a common data model that is an extension of Quickbooks data. The data model lives in the cloud and developers are able to use the SDK to integrate between the desktop, cloud, and other applications in the ecosystem…For well over a year I've been suggesting that Microsoft needs to take advantage of it's massive developer base to make any real progress with Azure. While this deal with Intuit is still a bit of a baby step, there are many other applications, both online and off, that could use Azure for a variety of purposes. This bodes well not just for Microsoft but for the cloud in general.”

The Microsoft Blog - Microsoft, Intuit team up to encourage cloud apps

“Azure is Microsoft's new platform as a service (PaaS) offering, designed to automatically manage and scale applications hosted on Microsoft's public cloud. Fueled by Microsoft's vast network of partners familiar with its programming languages, Azure will compete against similar offerings such as Google App Engine and Force.com.”

Oh...and we made techmeme :-)

More...

Phil Wainewright - Why Microsoft and Intuit need each other's clouds

“Cloud platforms share many of the ingredients of conventional software platforms, but they add several crucial new ingredients. One thing that hasn’t changed is the need to build momentum among developers and customers for the platform. Intuit and Microsoft have plenty of both, which guarantees attention for what they’ve announced today. But the tie-up between these two giants is important too for the light it shines on the special characteristics of cloud platforms and how they change the game in so many ways for ISVs, developers and platform vendors…

...the link-up combines Microsoft’s strengths in developer tools and functional scope with Intuit’s advanced skills and investment in service delivery on IPP”

Federated Apps on the Intuit Partner Platform

alexbarnett — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:52:00 GMT

So what have I been working on since joining Intuit? A bunch of stuff, but something I wanted to shout about is the release of “Federated Applications” on the Intuit Partner Platform.

Working closely with five new developers to Intuit's Platform as a Service (PaaS), VerticalResponse, DimDim, Rypple, Setster, and ExpenseWare, we've got some kick-ass apps federated into the platform.

Some nice coverage so far this morning, including:

Ben Kepes, CloudAve Intuit Launches the IPP Version 2

"After the briefing I have to say that it looks to me like IPP is finally offering to fulfil the promise of the end-to-end integrated small business software platform that I’ve been evangelising for a few years now – my catch cry of late has been that application integration should only be seen as the very first step in building a SaaS ecosystem. Much more important is the aggregation of applications. This may be data aggregation, UI aggregation, sign-on integration or billing integration – and ideally users and vendors would determine what parts of the integration they bought into."

Leena Rao at TechCrunch - Intuit’s Partner Platform Goes Multilingual With Federated Apps

“The “Federated Applications” functionality lets developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace. Applications won’t have to be rewritten to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process.”

Phil Wainewright, ZDNet: Intuit makes two-pronged PaaS and SaaS push

“The significant element of Intuit’s PaaS announcement is that it is a land-grab to capture mindshare among developers on other cloud platforms, who can take their AppEngine, Amazon Web Services or self-hosted applications and make them available using Intuit’s single sign-on, billing and QuickBooks integration infrastructure. Market reach being one of the key attributes developers look for in a new platform, perhaps the most appealing factor is that applications will be showcased within the Intuit Marketplace, with a potential reach to the four-million-strong installed base of QuickBooks accounting software customers and their estimated 25 million employees.”

What I've found very cool about this new Federated Apps capability for IPP is that fact that these different SaaS apps are developed on a variety of stacks and hosted outside of the IPP platform.. One of the apps is built on Java. Another is built enirely on .NET. Another is a mix of RoR and LAMP. Another built of Flex (on their own hosting environment - not IPP). If an app was running on EC2, that would work too, as would an app built on Google's AppEngine. It doen't matter - the integration points for Federated Apps are just that and pretty lightweight (one of the partners was able to turnaround the work with 1 developer in less than two weeks, including time for the technical review of the app). We made a deliberate decision to make IPP agnostic to the technology that developers want to use. Yes, we have a "native" stack also, but the options we are providing developers now means there is no technology lock-in to speak of.

Here is some more information on the details of federation and how you as a developer can get started.

Oh, and a quick plug on the talk I'll be giving on how to federate applications to IPP at the Startups and the Cloud event next week in the Boston area.

Joining Intuit

alexbarnett — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:02:00 GMT

Firstly - thanks to everyone who has reached out to me in the last three weeks via email, phone calls and comments since I shared the news of my pursuit for the next adventure - I have really appreciated everyone's support and interest in my next steps.

The great news is I'll be joining Intuit as a Group Manager working in a fast growing start-up team responsible for leading the Intuit Partner Platform. Below is a snippet and some links to blog posts and articles that should give you a fairly good idea about where my focus will be a week from now.

Although I'll be working from the Orem office (Utah) to start off with, the plan is to ultimately move to the greater Boston area - another new adventure. I've visited Boston three times in the last year or so and have loved it more and more with each visit, so watch out Boston!

This is a fantastic opportunity for me personally - the team has ambitious goals and an amazing set of existing assets to leverage (see some of the numbers below) in becoming a significant player in the cloud computing space. I look forward to sharing stories of my new journey with you.

Intuit Partner Platform Opens to Developers (Sept 15 2008)

"The Intuit Partner Platform not only gives developers the opportunity to build Web-based applications, but successful SaaS businesses by taking the complexity out of managing infrastructure, hosting, user management, integration and billing. Now developers can focus on developing innovative on-demand software solutions that solve unique and important problems for the four million small and mid-market businesses across the U.S. that use QuickBooks and the 25 million employees that work in those companies.

The platform-as-a-service offering allows developers to combine the powerful open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder and the proven database of Intuit QuickBase to build rich Internet applications that work with QuickBooks data. They can also leverage Adobe AIR to provide additional desktop-like functionality in their applications, such as pop-up notifications, local file system access, local data storage, and the ability to create a fully branded user experience.

"We have now accepted more than 1,000 developers into the program and it is exciting to hear their ideas and energy about what they want to build," said Alex Chriss, business leader for the Intuit Partner Platform. "Customers will benefit greatly from the imagination and expertise that developers use to solve problems facing their specific industries." "

Web 2.0 Expo NYC - Intuit Connected Services (Sept 19 2008)
Intuit Makes SaaS Play Guns For Salesforce (Sept 18 2008)
Intuit’s flexy PaaS (Aug 14 2008)
Intuit enters the PaaS wars (April 28 2008)
Intuit’s Radical New Flex + QuickBase Cloud Platform (April 16 2008)

How ADO.NET Data Services came to be (formerly known as Project Astoria)

alexbarnett — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:16:00 GMT

Pablo Castro has recounted some of his timelined memories about how "Project Astoria" evolved from a lunch time conversation to bits in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 now known as ADO.NET Data Services Framework). Nice write up.

Three memories of my own to add to the story:

1. I was reading up on the whole REST thing in the summer of 2006 - its origins, philosophy and design patterns. I knew there was something interesting going on and some potential dots to join, but I wasn't sure which dots...So I collated and circulated a bunch of research / links to the team, then blogged the links (I liked How I explained REST to my wife. More recently see Explaining REST to Damien Katz). I got a few proverbial (and some literal) blank stares as I shared my enthusiasm for REST, asking how we could apply the ideas to the various projects we were working on. It was Pablo, and (as Pablo attests) Britt Johnston (now a PUM for SQL Business) who were able to develop the initial conceptual leaps into something more concrete like a Think Week Paper and a prototype demo.

2. When it came to brainstorming the code name, the team agreed on a "cloud" theme. A number of proposals were floated around along with their rationales, including "cumulus" and "cirrus". We were then advised that city and town code names were legal-safe. So there we were, struggling to agree on some city or town name we all liked (or at least not hate nor be confused by..."how about Nameless?"...), and then Mike Pizzo's proposal came in: "Astoria - hey, it's the cloudiest city in the USA!" (at least it was in 2006). Sold.

3. I think my favorite memory of all is the reaction Gary Flake provided (of Microsoft's Live Labs) to the prototype Pablo demo'd at one of the pitch meetings: "As God himself would have designed it!" Dr Flake exclaimed..."Cool", I thought to myself - "but does that mean no REST for the wicked?"

Open Source in a SaaS World

alexbarnett — Fri, 16 May 2008 03:01:00 GMT

About a year ago, I took part in a meeting where the question: "What does open source "mean" in a SaaS world?" came up in conversation.

A year later, that same question is becoming increasingly pertinent as the IT industry's move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud-based computing accelerates.

For Bungee Labs (I work there), where

we provide an entire platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
developers create, share and re-use code and deploy apps in the cloud
developers "consume" and program against third party web apis and will create their own

...the "meaning" of FOSS is central within these different contexts and has many possible answers with many non-trivial implications...Three dimensional chess as it were.

(pic source: Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki)

For this post, I want to share some of the considerations relating to # 1) above: the context of open sourcing Bungee Labs' own system (Bungee Connect). Last month we stated that:

"Bungee Labs is evaluating several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licenses for the software components that comprise the complete Bungee Connect system. However, the task of reviewing the various FOSS licenses, and then identifying which of them best aligns with the software components and subsystems created by Bungee Labs–as well as ensuring compatibility with third-party components upon which Bungee Connect relies–requires considerable review and source code preparation. And we want to do this right, with the community’s involvement."

Since and before that announcement, Ted Haeger (who runs the Bungee Connect Developer Network) has been discussing some of the issues at hand and some of the options we see before us with some very "FOSS savvy" communities at events such as Socal Linux Expo, LugRadio Live USA and LinuxFest Northwest and of course with Bungee Connect's own growing developer community.

Today there's an interesting conversation going on between Ted and Simon Wardley, ex-COO of Zimki / Fotago who resigned last year over the company's decision not to open source their platform (the video of his announcement at a OSCON 2007 talk he gave "Commoditisation of IT and What the Future Holds" makes for entertaining and informative viewing all of its own...Simon discusses open source in a SaaS context. Update: Simon let me know of this video which also includes the slides

Anyway, back to the thread:

Simon wrote a post this morning providing his thoughts on the some the FOSS options available to Bungee Labs
Ted wrote back responding to Simon sharing his point of view
Then Simon responded to Ted

All three posts (and more to come no doubt) make an informative and interesting read, but I want to highlight one of the key issues in discussion.

The SaaS Loophole

The issue goes back to the question: "What does open source "mean" in a SaaS world?" and specifically the licensing issues. I'm going to quote and edit from Ted's post somewhat liberally (Ted owes me a Sushi, so we're quits now :P ) and isolate an (if not "the") open source licensing issue in the context of SaaS (my emphasis):

"Personally, I think that GPLv3 is the wrong license for freeing any SaaS or PaaS offering. The Free Software Foundation has a better license for this purpose.

GPLv3 is inadequate because it does not mandate that modifications that others make be opened. Originally, GPLv3 was planned to close up the “SaaS Loophole” (a.k.a. the “ASP Loophole”) in GPLv2. However, as I understand it, several large companies pressured the FSF to remove the key clause that would have closed the loophole.

What is the loophole? It’s this: if you take free software and offer it as a hosted service, then you are not conveying the software, and are therefore not obligated to reciprocate your modifications to the original code. In the context of service providers, GPLv3 is effectively the same as the BSD license. Many companies, Google among them, live inside this loophole. (For now, Bungee Labs is also in that camp.) Some remain there deliberately. Others are in it simply as a matter of course…that is, where they are in their business development process."

So that's the "SaaS loophole". Where's the loophole now? Ted explains:

"Perhaps the argument could have been made in the age of GPLv2 that the SaaS Loophole was an oversight, but now that GPLv3 has the loophole by design, it’s really no longer a loophole. The latest version of the license supports the practice. (And just to be clear, I am not advocating this for Bungee Connect.)

...Say Bungee Labs opens Bungee Connect under GPLv3. Is there a danger that small companies could replicate our offering? I don’t think that’s the case. But could a well-funded company do the same, fork the code, and then fund an engineering team to outpace the original inventors?

...The Free Software Foundation also provides the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, or AGPLv3. AGPLv3 specifically closes the SaaS loophole. Instead of being triggered by conveying the software, AGPLv3 is triggered by accessing the service. This helps to reduce the risk that a company could not branch the code and then out-engineer the originators, as the vulture company would be obligated to share-alike terms with their derivations."

So, is the AGPLv3 the right license for Bungee Labs to pursue? Is it the right license for SaaS providers? Is it enough on its own? (back to Simon Wardley's point in his post). Each company has their own unique circumstances and they each need to think through the 3D chess game. We're still working it out at Bungee Labs.

For us at least, I think some of the potential answers are becoming clearer, and others not yet. But it is the kinds of discussions that Ted is having with Simon that are a critical part of Bungee Labs' decision making process around FOSS. It cannot be an insular process.

Designing Web APIs - Twitter Learnings

alexbarnett — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:08:00 GMT

Although I made it to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, I didn't make it to a session Matt McAlister blogged about by Twitter’s Alex Payne and Michael Migurski of Stamen Design who presented learnings from the perspective of an API provider.

But I can see the slide deck discussing the Twitter API and so can you:

| View | Upload your own

More Web 2.0 session slides available here. Recommended:

Videos of sessions here. Check out Clay Shirky's session, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (a good read btw).

See Results of Bungee Connect's Intern DevFest 2008

alexbarnett — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:54:00 GMT

In late 2007, fifty Computer Science university students applied for 2008 internships at Bungee Labs. We flew nine of the most promising applicants from around the US to join Bungee Labs for our first “Intern DevFest”.

Over a 24 hour period the students had to extend WideLens - the Bungee Connect calendaring reference application - to develop new features and create a new derivative WideLens application…then present the results to the judging panel.

The nine students slogged hard all day (with frisbee breaks!) and most of the night and then presented their mashup solutions to the judging team the next morning.

Check out the video highlights of the four winners.

Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and more with WideLens

alexbarnett — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:37:00 GMT

Google has just released a very cool utility (.exe download for Windows) providing users with the ability to synchronize their Google Calendar with Outlook.

Some nice features in their 0.9.3.0 release:

schedule the sync frequency: every x minutes
define directional flow: 2-way, and 1-way (either way)

A bit of a buzz going on about this...

Now, what if you could do the same over the web - no download, just use your browser (IE, FF, Safari)...? And not just Google Calendar <> Outlook, but others too...?

Well, it's certainly possible...First, watch this screencast I put together tonight (apologies for sound quality...done from home equipment):

About WideLens

A couple of weeks back Bungee Labs released a reference calendaring application, called WideLens, designed to show off some of the power of the Bungee Connect platform, from the kind of rich AJAX UI experiences delivered through to the high level of functionality developers can create by wiring up and integrating multiple web services and distributed web data sources into a single web app.

Video: WideLens User Experience
Video: Developer Overview

WideLens connects to Microsoft Exchange calendar, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds, representing a variety of protocols and authentication schemes. MS Exchange is accessed through WebDav, Google Calendar through gData, Salesforce.com via SOAP, Facebook through REST and MySQL connectivity is based on client libraries provided by MySQL (integrated directly inside Bungee Connect).

WideLens is an uber-mashup.

WideLens connects to each of the sources in real-time, presenting the user with live data. With the exception of Facebook and iCalendar, users can create and modify events and those changes are immediately posted back to the source. MySQL pulls double duty, serving as both a WideLens native calendar source and as the persistence layer for all kinds of application data including user preferences and credential information for each service.

Developers: Have At it!

As mentioned above, WideLens has been released as a Bungee Connect reference application where we're encouraging Bungee Connect developers to customize the WideLens application as much as they want, deploy their own version of the app as their own app - to their own domain, at no charge, branded however they want and with whatever features / cuts / modifications / extended they want - the WideLens code is released under a BSD licence (read more here).

To get going with Bungee Connect and develop your own vision of what WideLens could do, sign up for your Bungee Connect account.

Astoria at MIX08 (REST in Vegas)

alexbarnett — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:11:00 GMT

As much as I'd love to make it to MIX08 this week, time will not allow me...But if I were, then I'd be going to the following three sessions related to the Project Formerly Known as Astoria:

Wed, March 5th - RESTful Data Services with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework
Fri, March 7th - Accessing Windows Live Services via AtomPub
Fri, March 7th - Building RESTful Real World Applications with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework

Time to Define "Platform as a Service" (or PaaS)

alexbarnett — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:27:00 GMT

Before joining Bungee Labs last year, I knew they were on to something big. I mean, really big.

A big idea, an ambitious vision: to provide developers with end-to-end development, testing, deployment and hosting of sophisticated web applications as a service delivered purely in the cloud.

Since we announced our private beta back in May 2007, we've had over 1,500 developers sign up. In January alone we had over 400 developers kicking the tires - not just signing up and disappearing, but 400 returning developers, learning, building and deploying out increasingly sophisticated apps on a fast evolving developer platform, requiring no install of anything on their machine - all through the browser.

And since May 2007, the trend to delivering software as a service (SaaS) has been moving at terrific pace. New web APIs are being made available every month and new announcements by start-ups as well established big players are reinforcing and fueling the acceleration to the inevitable world of cloud computing.

As we announce our move from private to public beta today, we've also tried to articulate the new category of product and service we believe Bungee Connect is at the forefront of defining, the category of Platform as a Service, or PaaS, and our big bet is that PaaS is the next big thing.

So what is a "Platform as a Service"?

In September 2006, Marc Andreessen posted his thought provoking "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet" and it got a fair level attention from the web industry. And we took note. We thought what Marc was describing in his Level 3 definition where:

"A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.",

...was right, but only partly right. Given Bungee Labs' ambition and vision, we felt there was a lot more to Marc's definition of the highest level definition of an "internet platform", a definition more holistic and comprehensive than a runtime.

But we kept focused, kept working on what we were hearing our developers telling us we needed to fix and improve on Bungee Connect, to give what developers are telling us what they really want - a Platform as a Service - to provide everything required in the lifecycle for the development through hosting of full-on, sophisticated and highly interactive web apps, not just widgets.

As we were readying for our next phase -our public beta - we thought it would be a good time to put a stake in the ground and actually define what we mean when we use the term Platform-as-a-service, and thereby describe the comprehensiveness what Bungee Connect has to offer.

So early this morning, our CTO and Founder of Bungee Labs, Dave Mitchell posted a definition describing PaaS in concrete terms.

What follows is a summary of Dave's post, with a selection of my favorite "soundbites" and ideas, but I suggest you read the whole post for yourself - there's a fair amount to consider:

1) Develop, Test, Deploy, Host and Maintain on the Same Integrated Environment.

"It’s time to stop developing “here” and running “there”. Today, most applications are coded in one environment (usually custom-built for that project by a developer), then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production...In a completely-realized PaaS, the entire software lifecycle is supported on the same computing environment, dramatically reducing costs of development and maintenance, time-to-market and project risk. A PaaS should let developers spend their time creating great software, rather than building environments and wrestling with configurations just to make their applications run — let alone testing, tuning and debugging them...Also, an end-to-end PaaS should provide a high productivity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) running on the actual target delivery platform, so that debugging and test scenarios run in the same environment as production deployment.

2) User Experience Without Compromise

"A Platform-as-a-Service must deliver compelling user experiences, with all the richness and live interactivity that consumers have been conditioned to expect....Hiccups like software downloads or plug-in installations, browser dependencies and inconsistencies, or local executables break the web model, and are inherently less secure, less maintainable and less user-friendly. In order to be relevant and popular, PaaS must deliver the best user experience available on the web, comparable to or better than conventional approaches.

3) Built-in Scalability, Reliability, and Security

"Developers should be free to build applications with the comfort that the security of customer data, network traffic, source code (intellectual property) and even server hardware is maintained automatically by the platform through-out application development and delivery."

4) Built-in Integration with Web Services and Databases.

"Applications need to leverage existing software investments in databases, and internal or external third party web services, requiring that the platform offer a wide variety of connectivity options."

5) Support Collaboration

"A PaaS must support both formal and on-demand collaboration throughout the entire software lifecycle (development, testing, documentation and operations), while maintaining security of source code and associated intellectual property."

6) Deep Application Instrumentation

"With instrumentation, organizations can see exactly how users are using the application, the type of performance they are experiencing and any application crashes. This information can also be leveraged to create new business models where costs are tied to actual utilities, rather than flat-rate subscriptions or licenses."

Over the next couple of years we expect to be hearing a lot more about PaaS and how "Y announcement" by "X company" is now providing true a PaaS offering to businesses and developers.

But saying you are providing a Platform as a Service has to mean something, and we think the above definition sets a high but reasonable standard that must be met for any company to claim they are providing a "platform-as-a-service' and legitimately describe themselves as a PaaS player.

The amazing thing is, for me at least, is that Bungee Connect is delivering all of the above, today. From our point of view, delivering PaaS - the real deal - is not statement of Bungee's intent, it's a statement of fact. It's bold, but so is our vision. Yes, we've still a lot to do before we're commercially ready and we think that's coming soon, but so much is already there. Try it out.

Among the dynamos, My Data and advice for startups.

alexbarnett — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:41:00 GMT

SaaS / DaaS / WaaS (Whatever As a Service) and Mashups

Nick Carr quotes Henry Adams in Among the dynamos

“One lingered long among the dynamos,” he wrote, “for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase.

Pointing to SaaS Platforms trends, Clive Keyte write about "SaaS Management Platforms"

"Force.com is not on it’s own offering ‘cloud development facilities for SaaS applications though, there are a plethora of smaller companies entering into the fray including Bungee Connect"

Among the dynamos indeed...

And SaaS by the numbers: Salesforce.com: 24 Billion API Calls So Far

"This statistic along with others like 130 million transactions daily, 61,200 custom applications, and 750 AppExchange apps"

Bray Forrest informs us even Your Car Gets An API

"At the end of the month the Dash will get a RESTful API. At the user's initiative lat/long coordinates can be sent to a server. The Dash will consume a GeoRSS feed. This is just the first release. In the future they may add HTML pages, search and even the ability to poll. The device I saw did not have any API-driven apps loaded, but I can imagine great ones (update my location and finding out who from my YASN contacts are nearby)."

So what will we do with all these APIs? Mashups of course! What is a MashUp?

"Potatoes + beans + a little bit of beef + pork, and then you pour Smithwicks over the top of it."

Ah...Microsoft Research project alert: Rotunda: Profiling the Cloud

"the goal of the project is to be able to profile the performance of a Web application from the time a user clicks on a link and triggers an event in the browser—which triggers a database lookup—through each point of the resolution of the transaction."

Sounds a lot like Bungee Connect instrumentation designed to measure every transactions from user's browser interactions and server-side roundtrips, through to the app's service calls, triggers, events, response times, etc...You see, our business model demands we and our developers know this...we have this today :-)

My Data

The UK gets some relief from the ID Card madness, for a while anyway...turns out National ID cards scheme will delayed until 2012:

"The Government’s national identity card scheme was “in the intensive care ward” after leaked documents showed plans to issue UK citizens with the cards have been delayed until after the next election."

Phew! Seeing stories like this seems to be knocking sense to those who are living in cloud-cuckoo land...

On the other end of the "my data" equation: cries of "we want our data, when we want it and where we want it" are getting heard...

Here's video intro to DataPortability.org initiative: DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix.

"DataPortability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go."

Niall Kennedy's take on Data Portability, Authentication, and Authorization.

"Data authorization is the first step in data portability."

Enter OpenID and OAuth.

How will DataPortability.org keep from being hijacked by Microsoft? Now Microsoft has joined the fray, so does the inevitable questioning begin:

"So is the nascent DataPortability.org group at such risk from Redmond? Not according to a source inside the group."

News of Last.fm's on demand since CBS's acquisition hit the mainstream tech media yesterday. But what next? CBS Will Try To Convert Last.FM Acquisition To Video Value

“One of the reasons we liked the idea of buying it is, if we can develop a great social networking site around this music content, why couldn’t this extend in to entertainment, in to news sports, all businesses that we’re in"

Kaching!

Martin Plaehn's Quick Hits: Do's and Dont's of Entrepreneurship. 16 pieces of advice for start-ups.

"6. Do always accumulate choice; two by definition, three of four is better; then make decisions and have a back-up"

More Investments Into Open Source

News that Alfresco Gets Another $9M for Open Source Content Management

"Alfresco Software, an open source content management alternative to software created for large companies, has received an additional $9 million in a third round of financing, led by SAP Ventures and existing investors Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund"

However, not all the shareholders are happy with the Alfresco deal...Matt Asay wrote in New open source venture funding and the importance of SAP Ventures and Intel Capital

"But since we didn't need the money (not even remotely) and I didn't want the dilution, it's not my favorite news of the day."

Amen to that.

Uh Oh...

Mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep

"Radiation from mobile phones delays and reduces sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to a new study, reports The Independent"

Video demo: REST Describe & Compile for WADL

alexbarnett — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:08:00 GMT

In March 2007, I naively asked if REST needs a WSDL and if yes, was WADL the one (Web Application Description Language). The conversation goes on, but I thought the video below and pointers might be of interest to those who have an opinion one way or the other.

The video Google Chalk Talk was published last week and shows Thomas Steiner demoing REST Describe & Compile, an online editor and a compiler for REST Web services based on SUN engineer Marc Hadley's Web Application Description Language (WADL).

(huh? video not available as embeded??? wtf? Here's the link to it)

"ABSTRACT

REST Describe & Compile is an editor and a compiler for REST Web services based on SUN engineer Marc Hadley's Web Application Description Language (WADL). REST Describe & Compile is implemented using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and is split up in two sub-apps:
REST Describe:
This component takes a (set of) URL(s) as input and tries to analyze the parameters regarding parameter types and Web service structure. It then generates a WADL representation for the given URL(s), represented in an editable, tree-like form. Typical input would be GET
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService=0ZMFM7HPBYYY0SPERCR2=ItemSearch=Enterprise+Integration+Patterns=Books
or GET http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed...%7BuserID%7D/albumid/%7BalbumID%7D/photoid/%7BphotoID%7D?kind=kinds=0=1{userID}/albumid/{albumID}/photoid/{photoID}?kind=kinds=0=10

REST Compile:
This component allows for the WADL representation of a Web service to be "compiled" to working programming code in various languages (for the moment these languages are Java, PHP5, Python, and Ruby). The idea is thus similar to WSDL2Java, however in a more general WADL2Anything way.

The application can be tested online:
http://tomayac.de/rest-describe/latest/RestDescribe.html

There are some screencasts available on YouTube: http://youtube.com/profile?user=tomayac

Speaker: Thomas Steiner
Thomas Steiner works as a Customer Solutions Engineer from Barcelona, Spain, and has joined Google full-time only since October 1st. However, he has been with Google first as an intern and then as a temorary contractor since February 2005. During his time at Google, Thomas has created the Google APIlity PHP Library for the AdWords API, as well as the APIlity Agua Ajax application, which can be seen as an Ajax GUI for AdWords. From January 2007 till July 2007, Thomas did his Final Year Project with Google, where the REST Describe & Compile application was to be developed, hosted by Googler Patrick Chanezon."

Related, last week Assaf (a true web pragmatist) wrote in his post REST IDL, substance over style

"So far most of the suggestions I saw are turf wars in disguise, arguing for this syntax or that, but never for what it should describe. WADL so far looks like one of those best-for-my-platform choices, the constant mentioning of Microformats, which are not optimized for this task, is another danger sign.

It has to start somehow, but it better start with substance, not with style."

I agree with the last statement...

Now, I don't know if Assaf has seen the above video or not, and if not, whether the video would further sway him one way on WADL or not...anyone else have thoughts on what's in the video or tool demo'd, or WADL itself?

What I'm reading...

alexbarnett — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:06:00 GMT

There are a whole bunch of interesting posts / stuff I find on the net that I bookmark on del.icio.us (at least, I think they are interesting). Over the years I've been experimenting with different ways of sharing these with you. My most recent solution has been to include my del.icio.us links within my feed as seperate items. The problem with this approach is I haven't had a permalinked way of publishing these to my blog with a way to easily edit prior to publishing...also, having the daily summaries del.icio.us format in a feed is lame.

So I going to try something new. Instead of having the daily del.icio.us link summaries published as RSS items within my Feedburner feed, I'm going to publish these as blog posts. It should make things more economical from the consumption point of view (I don't think the "Links for 2008-01-20 [del.icio.us]" blah blah feed item titles are pretty). To do this, I have:

disabled the del.icio.us feed syndication from Feedburner (the Link Splicer)
have installed Josh Leggard's Insert Feed Content plugin for Windows Live Writer - this lets me populate a draft blog post with the latest items from any feed (my del.icio.us feed in this case - I'll still use the service for bookmarking) that I can then include / edit / add more commentary before I post to my blog - along with a custom post title.

Better me thinks. I like Harry Pierson's and Assaf's Labnotes style of providing links with commentary...over time I hope to emulate these.

So here goes - this first effort will be larger than future posts like this...shorter in the future.

OpenID - Getting Traction

Telegraph to become OpenID provider
"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider."
Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID; Users Able to Access Multiple Internet Sites with Their Yahoo! ID
Sweet!
Stories we want to see in 2008
"Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Endorse Support OpenID and OAuth"

Cool UI / Vizualization and Useful Bits

external hard disk treemap
"an external hard disk that shows the content of the hard disk on its outside skin."
Fascinating new way of entering text
"Dasher is a really fascinating interface that allows you to write by browsing through letters using a finger, mouse or some other pointing devise."
How Does FeedDemon Calculate Attention?
Nick Bradbury: "FeedDemon's algorithm for determining a feed's attention rank has changed since I first wrote about it, but it's still very simple."
using delicious on your iphone
Perfect. All I need is an iPhone now.
wmIRC.com - IRC client for Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC / Phone Edition
"IRC for when you're on the move."

SaaS Stuff

Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3
Amazon S3 101.
How to package up the SaaS platform
Phil Wainwright: "Sun’s intervention gives MySQL’s open source database an aura of greater enterprise readiness than it previously had, backed up by fully accountable support offered on a traditional commercial basis."
Updates to URI Syntax in Dec 2007 ADO.NET Data Services CTP
Astoria gets URI syntax updates.
The Idea of Software as a Service Platform
I still don’t see desktop GIS being replaced by web services anytime soon.
600 Web APIs
Programmable Web's 600 web APIs.
Enter the Internet Cloud
"The Internet cloud [is] where the distributed and programmable network of services across the globe will serve all the data, resources and functionality we will ever use." Good quote ;-)
Your Data in the Cloud - URL-based computing, SimpleDB, Astoria, etc.
Michael Cote: "the question for Astoria, SimpleDB, and all these “the non-relational database” databases isn’t so much a question of a good idea or not, but the way the technology is packaged and delivered."
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
Dion Hinchcliffe on the worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.
Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008
Phil Wainwright: "The coming year is going to be a pivotal one for anyone involved in software-as-a-service."
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
New book by Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? "A hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power with steam engines and generators and plugged into the newly built electric grid." Next - everything software.
Is Red Hat's New Development Environment Destined for an Amazon or IBM Cloud?
Dana Gardner: "Tools in the clouds."

Developer Cults and Dataheads

Sriram Krishnan: Amazon SimpleDB - Technical Overview
"I love the data model for SimpleDB."
The Cults of Programming
"In my experience with various programmers over the years, I've realized that most of them fall into one of several cults which describe their behavior." Via Assaf.
Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster
How many of the 15 Twitter employees are dedicated to managing all this?
Eventual Consistency Is Not That Scary
"Get ahead of the curve and understand for your application what the consistency requirements will be."
Eventually Consistent
"Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the concept of eventual consistency in the context of data replication."
Make Money Fast - Introducing Amazon DevPay
"With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us."
Facebook Right, Scoble Wrong: Social Network Interoperability and the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp
Dare Obasanjo: "The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service."
ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Transforms SQL Server into an Atom Store
Wow.
Rails 2.0: It's done!
Er, Rails 2.
Volta Fundamentals
Erik Meijer's latest. In essence Volta is a recompiler.

Uncategorizable But Good.

Lessons from Star Wars
Johnnie Moor's pointer: "Stephen Anderson shares his presentation about what designers can learn from the making of Star Wars."

Podcast interviews - smart people in the world of the web

alexbarnett — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:41:00 GMT

One of the fun parts of my job at Bungee Labs is to partner up with Ted and interview some smart people in the world of the web. We publish these as a podcast series (the Bungee Line - podcast feed here) over on the BCDN blog.

If you have ideas about someone you think we should interview, let me know! We're focusing on topics we think web developers might be interested in the worlds of software as a service and web app development, in particular profiling web apis. Related topics are good too.

I've listed out below our most recent podcasts below...plenty more in the works (previous podcasts are listed here). Hope you like :-)

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2)

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1)

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."