Jaywalk

The future that is here is not evenly distributed. Every now and then, however, glimpses of technological advancement outside my own perimeter make it to my radar screen. This time, I came across with this press release:

“Open source virtual world developers OpenSim are building a global standard to power the 3D internet, now joined by Finnish developer’s realXtend, OpenSim gains many new key features and technologies.”

Backed by the vision and generosity of Juha Hulkko, the realXtend project injects some very interesting features to OpenSim virtual world platform. The philosophy behind realXtend is akin to the world wide web: the end users could create their own worlds and network these with other virtual worlds. Thereby the platform would provide business opportunities in terms of creating content and services thereupon. Imagine a virtual storefront with the same layout as in the real life, for instance.

As the first step towards the grand vision, realXtend has implemented the global avatar architecture, in which the avatar and asset storage is separated from the virtual world server, providing the users with identity and authentication independent of the world they happen to be in at any given time. It is planned that the avatars will become a central communications tool combining email, text messages, VoIP, and instant messaging into an easy to use package.

I had some problems in setting up realXtend on my computer, but the demo video looks really cool!

It will be interesting to see if this 3D Web takes off and will be able to leverage network externalities and architecture of participation. At least the developers have tried to keep it simple to build business applications on top of the platform: advanced python scripting provides an easy way to connect the virtual world application to any networked service and device; also the world building has been made easy and WYSIWYG for non-technical designers. Moreover, permissive BSD licensing allows developing proprietary business applications that can even be sold as products.

In his recent article, David Linthicum criticizes big consulting organizations of how they generally sell, plan and deliver SOA solutions to their clients.

He maintains that many projects quoted as SOA references are actually JBOWS projects (just a bunch of Web Services), merely service-enabling existing systems without due consideration of architecture, agility and changeability. Reminding that SOA should be more about architecture than technology, Linthicum attacks the “SOA-in-a-box movement” where predetermined technology is force-fit with the problem, resulting in a suboptimal solution. He also calls for a specific approach that addresses the unique nature of SOA and emphasizes the importance of planning that is often overlooked.

Linthicum does not hold SOA consulting in very high regard:

“Consultants who succeed with their SOA initiatives have a wide range of skills, a good understanding of architecture and the value of SOA, and all of the good work that needs to occur to make it work for the client. However, I don’t see many out there who fit that bill, and the amount of bad advice is becoming a huge issue. Unfortunately, many of their clients won’t figure this out until it’s too late.”

What Linthicum does not explicitly point out is that System Integrators are used to occasional integration projects in their large client companies. It is not in their immediate best interest to change this modus operandi and plan more resilient and reusable architectures. It is the small SOA boutique houses with specialized architecture skills that will be of most benefit for businesses, while waiting for the big ones to pick up on speed.