Fiorano Component Gallery – for business analysts??
Fiorano just…
…announced availability of its new Component Gallery. The idea, described as similar to iTunes for music, is that
“the Fiorano Component gallery allows business analysts to assemble ready-to-deploy business solutions using standards-based coarse-grained software Components with XML interfaces”
So there is a repository of components that can be downloaded to build business solutions. The idea is quite neat, although it does depend on people donating (or selling) components in the gallery. However, my concern about these types of ’standard template’ mechanisms for packaged application assembly is that the application can never be decoupled from the business concerned. For example, a company may have strict programming guidelines making any component built outside of these procedures inappropriate. Standard transformation and interface components may be useful with well-known packages such as SAP, but with homegrown applications they are of limited use.
I shall watch developments with interest. However, my biggest concern is the way that this component gallery is portrayed as allowing business analysts to assemble these solutions from the component gallery. A quick look at the current components in the gallery reveal such components as EJBAdapter, BeanShell, JMSRequestor etc.. The business analysts I know would not feel comfortable dealing with their applications at this level. My own view is that the target audience is clearly a more IT-literate programming one.
Steve
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Assuming that components are built with XML interfaces, standard XSLT transformations allow components to be combined in any manner, enabling the creation of arbitrarily complex business processes. So standard XML and XSLT are quite powerful for general purpose processes in practice – a fact borne out by many customers (at least of Fiorano).
The first cut of the gallery does have more components that are targeted towards “IT-Centric” people; after all creating an XSLT transformation is not particularly easy. However, assuming one has pre-built transformers, it is still possible to create codeless processes very rapidly and deploy them at the click of a button across an enterprise grid (assuming one has the right sort of software infrastructure in place)
Atul