Hype Cycle for Application Development

I recently read an article from Gartner Research (Hype Cycle for Application Development, ID Number G00147982). Generally I find the material from Gartner great. It's reasonably independent and provides the right level of detail for me mostly. It costs alot to access so you have to find an employer or university to part with the cash to subscribe. I recently heard from a vendor of mapping software that said Gartner wanted $40k to do a review of their software and include them in an appropriate "Magic Quadrant". So their independence is not absolute.

The "Hype Cycle" article was a good summary of what is happening in software development today and the relative maturity of a number of technologies, concepts and product sets. It was handy to brush up on some acronyms. ARAD SODA apparently means Architected Rapid Application Development Services-Oriented Development of Application. You can also have Architected, Model-Driven SODA. Now that seems to be putting all the current buzzwords together in a couple of long acronyms. When did 'architect' become a verb? Any way now I know that what I am trying to do at work is a SODA and, even though I quibble about the grammar, I want it to be architected.

The article itself was written by a number of contributors and provide a mix of succinct insightful writing and some marketing waffle. One of the less well defined concepts was Enterprise Information Management (EIM) which is its 'technical trigger' phase rising to a 'peak of inflated expectations'. I find EIM a little similar to Knowledge Management (KM) which in turn can be almost anything related to the enterprise. KM can be include building design, HR practices and telephone lists. It was one of those definitions that a like to ask "What is it not?" and more to the point "How is it useful?". EIM, like KM will be more an approach to looking at the whole organisation. This may bring up some useful concepts. KM seemed to spawn the concepts of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Before that people talked about the "stuff in our heads" and the "stuff written down" or for the geeks "biological data stores" and "digital data stores". Tacit knowledge was a vaguely useful concept. I don't think I'll championing my organisation to do EIM.

One of the more insightful parts of this article was the analysis of SOA by Roy Shulte and Yefim Natis. I am glad to see SOA is climbing the 'Slope of Enlightenment'. Something I have been struggling with is how many services my organisation has developed. I had assumed the number was zero until one of my senior developers showed me a list of all the EJBs he had built to access mainframe data and said "look at all these services". This did no fill me confidence. In a service I expect to see late binding, loose coupling, an XML interface, some aspect of self description and the ability to integrate using business process technology. Most of the SOA definitions I have seen are pretty vague and some a clearly business focused. These did no give me the ammunition to say that this was not the type of service I had in mind. The definition added to what I had seen previously.

"An application is an SOA application if it s modular; the modules are distributable; software developers have written or generated interface metadata that specifies and explicitly contract so that another developer can find and use the service; the interface is separate from the implementation (code and data) of the service provider; and the services are shareable..."

This should give me something to work on when I say I want this sort of service. Of course I could just say I want a web services with a SOAP interface. That might be easier. I get told SOA is not just web services though.

Hype cycles have their detractors but in general these hype cycles help see the big picture. IT shops are bombarded with a huge number of technologies. We are made to feel inferior by the marketers and our more progressive staff that we are behind because we are not employing the latest tools and techniques. The bottom line though is that many of these tools and techniques are not mature. They do not actually benefit all organisations and it takes time for conservative organisations to reap any benefit from investment some products that are billed as the next big thing.