Last year, I hacked my telecom startup, Teleku, to run OpenVBX, the cloud based and open source PBX maintained by Twilio. Here’s the story and video.
This year, Tropo partnered with Disruptive Technologies to add native Tropo support to the communications layer of the OpenVBX project enabling the cloud PBX to run on both the Twilio and Tropo platforms!
By now you have heard of SaaS (Software as a Service). The latest buzz is PaaS (Platform as a Service). SalesForce.com was the first well known initiator of this concept with their Force.com platform. Developers can build applications that are pre-deployed and hosted on a common platform. These applications can work tegether with other applications hosted on the same service and they are typically deployed in a cloud.
Mashups are a combination of web services (or APIs) to create a new service or site that extends information in a different way than a single service intended. Mashups are simple to create especially if you are using an enterprise 2.0 end user service such as Programmable Web.
Web 2.0 is a reference to the new style of social applications being developed online where the consumer is the content creator and where the wisdom of the crowds makes the data valuable. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include: blogs/tumblelogs (e.nterpri.se/2), wikis (wikipedia), and social networks (facebook).
Numly allows users to create copyrights on their creations in real-time online.
Imagine being able to interact with a database over the Internet as if it were in your domain. This is super simple with Rails applications and Active Resource! Any RESTful Rails application can be targeted using Active Resource to transact with all CRUD features.
Check out my Rubyology screencast and I’ll show you how easy it is!
To some degree, I do believe that Enterprise 2.0 is the introduction of Web 2.0-style social applications in the enterprise (private wikis, blogs, im/twitters, searchable social networks and skill sets and project/system documentation.
I do, however, believe that Enterprise 2.0 is more than that… I see opportunities to introduce business tools that allow non-IT professionals to access data and processes as services and even create business mashups dynamically without IT.
Rails 2.0 (Ruby on Rails) was recently released. Scaffolds now automatically create RESTful web services for *every* CRUD action. Services can be accessed by adding a .xml to the end of the URL. It’s that simple!
SOA standards typically include SOAP as the service messaging standard consisting of WSDLs and XML. A standard was needed so the industry worked out a multi-step, description-based solution involving XML.
Along came REST (Representational State Transfer) where everything has a resource URI and actions (CRUD - Create, Read, Update, and Delete) are controlled by verbs (Post, Get, Put, and Delete - respectively).
SOA has been around for a while now. It is becoming more evident that applications can be written in any language and run on any platform and can communicate with one another at a service level.
Services are assumed to be Web services but they don’t need to be.
