Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Really Simple Web 2.0

Web 2.0 apps look all shiny and bright, but we all know what horrors lurk within the typical enterprise IT shop. Web 2.0 will not be able to transform the enterprise until it can deal with real world integration nightmares like CICS systems, flat files accessed through obscure SNA protocols and AS/400s programmed in RPG.

Who is going to tame all this real world IT stuff and bring it into the bright shiny Web 2.0 world? SnapLogic and WaveMaker, that's who!

WaveMaker and SnapLogic announced today a partnership to use SnapLogic's Really Simple Integration platform to wrap any legacy data source as a web service. Once SnapLogic has "tamed the beast", WaveMaker provides a point and click, WYSIWYG development platform to expose legacy systems via rich internet applications.

Although we are performing very different tasks, both SnapLogic and WaveMaker are getting incredible value from creating web service-based products. SnapLogic wraps any data source as a web service, while WaveMaker assembles applications from any collection of web services. Chris Marino of SnapLogic also blogged about our partnership.

The following marketecture diagram shows the power of this approach. Rather than a rat's nest of one-off adapters, replicated data and custom data conversions, there is one clean API to the data - web services - and one simple tool for exposing the web services - WaveMaker!
To demonstrate the power of the rich and thin approach to web 2.0, WaveMaker and SnapLogic will be demonstrating an application at Web 2.0 Expo this week that integrates mainframe, minicomputer and relational data into a simple inventory tracking and re-ordering sytem. Stop by our booths and check it out!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Christopher,
I enjoyed your article. It mentioned CICS (which is why I found it). However, it seems that WaveMaker+SnapLogic don't allow access to one of the biggest gluts of CICS data; that is, data held hostage to CICS terminal-oriented transactions. Perhaps WaveMaker+SnapBridge+HostBridge could solve that nicely.
Russ