April 2008 — News
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Web 2.0 Event Draws the Bleeding-Edge Cloud Crowd
Tim O'Reilly woke up his end-of-the-day audience when he took the stage at last week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The publisher of the popular "In a Nutshell" computer books series declared that the Internet is fast becoming "a global platform for everything," and an "amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence."
"Up until now, a lot of the Web 2.0 activity has been on the consumer Internet," O'Reilly said, "but I think enterprises really are starting to understand that Web 2.0 is about turning themselves inside out, about becoming network citizens, opening themselves to the world in new ways.
If the number of enterprise-oriented announcements at the event is any indication, O'Reilly might be right. Eight notable commercial releases stood out in the bleeding-edge cloud crowd at this year's show.
SnapLogic's Data Integration Approach
SnapLogic released the 2.0 version of its namesake data integration framework. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company specializes in what it calls "Really Simple Integration," which uses RESTful Web technology to provide agile data integration for company IT groups. The company derives its integration model from RSS (really simple syndication), the XML-based system for aggregating and rapidly scanning information from blogs, news and current-event Web sites. With SnapLogic's integration solution in operation, "knowledge workers use familiar tools, including Web browsers, Google and Excel, to discover, consume, transform and publish enterprise data," according to company literature.
JackBe's Enterprise Mashups
Enterprise mashup solutions maker JackBe unveiled the second generation of its Presto product series. Presto 2.0 provides enterprise-ready mashup widgets known as "Mashlets." The company describes a Presto Mashlet as "portable and sharable micro-Web applications used for common knowledge-worker activities, such as analyzing sales data and tracking competitive information." The solution also comes with the Presto Wires visual mashup creation tool, a connector to support mashups in Excel, an Eclipse mashup plug-in, and a mashup connector API for JavaScript, REST, Java, Flash/Flex, Silverlight and C#.
3Tera's Online Apps Architecture
Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based 3Tera launched its Cloudware architecture at the show. The Cloudware architecture "incorporates the fundamental building blocks used in developing today's most popular applications," the company's literature says, including storage, computing, connectivity and security. Cloudware is based on the company's AppLogic grid operating system, which is designed to enable utility computing for deploying and scaling online apps. Cloudware is intended to be vendor agnostic. It will initially support Linux, Solaris and Windows operating systems.
