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Guest View: Improving the range of today’s applications


By John Gaudin
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November 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
IT consultant and Harvard professor Peter G.W. Keen developed a reach/range analysis in the 1990s that can be used to describe how distributed an application is (reach) and its degree of integration (range). Web technologies have become a user’s “single pane of glass” that resides in phones, badge readers, or anywhere network technologies can be used, making reach almost limitless.

Improving range has been more difficult as business applications remained stovepipes of isolated functionality. The forces of business opportunity and technological enablement have led to more loosely coupled architectures like SOA, while social networking has demonstrated that application components can form and reform more quickly and easily than conventionally programmed solutions. Composite applications called mashups now go beyond integrating data and text to incorporate maps, photos, music and video on-demand.

Application developers are faced with a daunting array of requirements. As SOA, composite and mash-up applications become the norm, developers must not only integrate with applications from within their own enterprise, but they may also need to incorporate functionality from external applications. It’s no longer as simple as updating a library and recompiling code to create compatibility with other applications in your organization. Web 2.0, social networking and composite applications are redefining application integration requirements. Even senior application architects often fail to fully consider how an application will perform when rolling out from development and test environments to a production environment that integrates external applications.

Applications are becoming more complex, yet user expectations are increasing. You need to consider how to address application complexity that affects reach and range over an application’s lifespan. Three factors are driving application complexity:

•    Applications are more distributed. Employee and customer users may be anywhere in the world, yet providing a high quality of experience is critical to business. Virtualization compounds the challenge, with application servers that may reside in any data center across the globe. These multiple moving parts make it difficult to meet user expectations for performance.
•    Users have an ever-increasing choice of devices. They expect to use whatever device they want when they want, wherever they’re located. Standardization is key, but standardizing using the end-to-end principle is exceedingly difficult to implement as the number of end-point types increase.
•    Integration requirements. Applications need to integrate internally across silos, along with external applications that provide business services such as geo-coding, credit checks, mapping, etc. Application developers need to integrate these different sources of information and present them in a single user interface.



Related Search Term(s): networking

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