Welcome to Glue!

Welcome to Glue! Glue is a conference (and blog) about the idea that now that the web is the platform, enterprise IT folks are faced with a problem similar to the enterprise application integration hell they faced in the late 90's. Namely, integrating web applications; or more correctly, loosely coupling, abstracting and sharing  the data, process and workflow that is common to those applications. Some folks have described the idea as "Interop for the Web." Others have called it "web oriented architecture." No matter what you call it, we hope to be a resource for these ideas.

So, first questions first: When is Glue? Well, that's the thing. We haven't decided yet. We've set this site up well in advance of when we plan to have the conference (early 09) because we want to gather your feedback. Glue will be sometime in early 2009. In the meantime, we'll be looking for every way possible to engage with people (architects, integrators, vendors, etc) around the ideas that make up Glue.

And what are those ideas? The categories are a bit fluid, but so far, we've identified the following:

Enterprise Glue: A "web oriented architecture" via mashups and RSS 

Marketing Glue: The abstraction of the management of ad platforms into a common interface

Social Network Glue: The movement toward cross-network interoperability and data sharing

Interface Glue: Cross-platform, cross-browser technologies like Silverlight and Apollo

Messaging Glue: Tools that are evolving for meta-messaging

Identity Glue: Reputation, user-centric identity and web SSO

OS Glue: Cross-operating system runtimes

Infrastructure Glue: Utility computing that binds back-end services 

What are we missing? That's the first place that you can help us build Glue...drop a note in comments.