By Neil McEvoy
Reprinted from: http://cloudbestpractices.net/2012/06/25/ideate/
Dave Duggal is the Founder and CEO of Consilience International, a NYC-based technology firm creating the Ideate framework.
We connected on a Linkedin thread when I posted a link to an old article of mine I had stumbled across, one where I suggested what was considered the Cloud then would ultimately evolve to become the technological Singularity.
Obviously this is a very futurist concept but it has immediate practical value when we consider the core mechanics involved.
Dave captured the critical piece in our chat:
Most Platform as a Service providers are just taking the same old middleware stack approches we found on-premise and throwing it on a virtualized server environment and saying ‘voila – cloud!’, but it is just causing a new generation of silo$B!G(Bd apps with yet another layer of indirection and complexity.
Absolutely. Really we are still in a technology phase where the Cloud is only a ‘version 1.5’, i.e. we are simply shifting an old concept of IT to a hosted model.
For it to leap to a version 2.0, 3.0 and beyond, our fundamental concepts of software and enterprise architecture will require changing and reflect an entire step-change from in-house data centres as the primary mode of IT, to one of a singular, interconnected environment.
The fundamental shift in software terms is to move away from interconnection via ‘hard-coded’ links between the applications and instead utilize smart agent, semantic web approaches.
Dave is pioneering such an evolution. He says:
What makes our approach different is that we’ve fused early Declarative programming ideas with REST architecture concepts for a “FunctionalWeb”. A 100% loosely-coupled environment where all binding is logical and dynamic. The technical details are somewhat esoteric, but building, governing and adapting composite apps from distributed and diverse applications resources is easy.
For more in-depth info on his technology, check out this Worldwide Web Conference / WS-REST workshop presentation and this InfoQ article.
