SOA Advisor
Enterprise Feed Bleeds
Get ready for making novel and powerful use of content via RSS feeds.
- By Dana Gardner
- 08/01/2007
You've probably just gotten used to the idea of "mashups" for quickly bringing Web services into applications and portals. Well, get ready for making novel and powerful use of content via RSS feeds in a similar way.
I don't call them mashups, though-I call them "feed bleeds." That's because syndicated feeds can be easily bled into one another to form aggregated streams of content. Not only that, users and developers can increasingly control the content mix.
RSS feeds act as conduits for distributing and managing content, data and media. These can complement more programmatic displays of relational data appearing in applications via ODBC, JDBC and SQL. Whereas data access protocols target structured content, RSS andAtom feeds open up the spigot to much more information.
Power to the People
What's important here is that nearly any kind of content can be driven through these feeds-from documents, spreadsheets and data to video, blogs, podcasts and online HTML instruction manuals. Feed bleeds allow for human knowledge in natural language to mingle and complement IT-based assets such as data, application services and automated event-driven processes. Think of it as broad integration on the cheap-and fast.
Unlike programmatic approaches, the developer can hand off to the end users the subscription to and fine-tuning of the content feeds. Users can adjust how much or how little on a subject they want. Businesses can control what feeds are allowed into the network and get general information on one business subject and highly specific content on another. The work process determines the right mix of procured feeds.
Indeed, the users can tap in-house or online directories to find the syndicated content they wish to add to their applications and process views. We're now seeing a lot more custom enterprise applications that contain and exploit RSS-based content. We're also seeing enterprises identify more in-house content that they should expose as feeds.
I think the new feed-bleed benefits are too powerful to ignore. By quickly finding information on almost any topic that's delivered through lightweight syndication, subscribers and aggregators can shape the information flow to help them in their work. They can then adjust the content qualitatively and quantitatively to tune the information for the tasks at hand.
Development Outlook
Developers can give users the tools to make content appear in the context of business processes. RSS-enabled Windows Vista and many standalone news readers help, but back-end servers with associated APIs now allow the exploitation of feeds, content and services within applications. We're even seeing a conceptual page borrowed from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the form of RSS feed "buses." This really is a case of Web 2.0 leading to Enterprise 2.0, leading to mainstream enterprise IT.
On-premises servers provide the management and integration of feeds. There are also on-demand feed tools. On-site feed-bleed providers include Apatar, JackBe, Kapow Technologies, RSSBus and StrikeIron. These suppliers allow all kinds of content (HTML, XML, PDFs, spreadsheets, CMS, RDBs, SOAP and REST, as well as RSS/Atom) to be bled together, organized, managed and presented. Online mashup tools come from Dapper, Open Kapow, Teqlo and Yahoo Pipes, among others. Apatar also has a hosted online offering in the works.
What's more, Software as a Service (SaaS) business applications providers like Salesforce.com (maps and data merge) and Workday are providing more mashups, feeds-based and enhanced services. If it's good for a SaaS provider it should be good for an enterprise.
The open source world is also a fan of feed bleeds. An increasingly effective lightweight database aggregation approach involves creating specific feeds of data from, say, MySQL data and SugarCRM applications that are then aggregated into common feeds that provide a single view of a customer, or an order, or a business process. This allows for whole new kinds of workflows, applications and processes-but on an agile timeframe.
Working Together
IBM's Vice President of Emerging Technologies, Rod Smith, is a fan of giving users the ability to fine-tune the content they need for their jobs. IBM itself has produced what it calls a "situational application" tool: a mashup enabler built on Zend Framework called QEDWiki (Quick and Easily Done). Smith recently told me he likes the idea of bringing together the Web 2.0 and enterprise IT communities so they can begin to work together, even if they don't necessarily speak the same language.
As Web 2.0 empowers younger workers to manage personal content online in new ways, they'll want to use similar approaches on the job. Should this be done via an end-run around IT? Or should IT embrace and extend mashups and feed bleeds?
I think it's clear that this one is too good to ignore.
About the Author
Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research and consulting firm. Gardner tracks and analyzes Web services, application-development tools and application optimization techniques. He is also the producer of the podcast series, BriefingsDirect.