As I was writing the last blog entry on Popfly going Beta, I realized that I had not yet posted an entry about my article on Enterprise Mashups that is in the current edition of The Architecture Journal. Josh Holmes, my friend and fellow architect evangelist, co-wrote the article with me this summer. We got the idea for the article at TechEd in Orlando and submitted the abstract. In July we found out that we had been accepted and began the process of interviewing and writing and we sent the article to “press” in August. I would like to thank Simon Guest (Editor in Chief) and the technical editors at the Journal for helping to create the article. They are a great bunch of people to work with.

If you are interested in reading the article you can see it online here.

Some thoughts on writing

I would really encourage everyone to try and do some writing. Articles are a wonderful way to get started (a lot of people think that you have to write a book). But if you are not up for tackling a full journal article, try an online publication or even your own blog. Writing really challenges you to think of topic in a different fashion and the process of writing can change the way that you think about a topic. Honestly the article that Josh and I ended up with was not the article that I had envisioned when we submitted the abstract, because we had to think about the audience of the article, we covered the topic in a lot different way than I though of when we started (for the better I hope).

Never finished

There is a quote that goes something like this:

Great poems are never finished, they are abandoned

What the quote means is that a truly great poem evolves over time. The poet will continue to work on it and obsess over it, finally he/she has to just walk away from the work and declare it done. I would rephrase it just slightly for journal articles:

Good articles are never finished, they are submitted seconds before the deadline

Since publication

Our article concludes with a prediction that more enterprises would investigate and adopt mashups in the future (we quoted a McKinsey study that said only 21 percent of the respondents were considering Mashups in their Enterprise). About 2 days after our article was sent to press the Economist published a survey that 42% of the companies were considering Mashups (double the number). It is really cool when a prediction comes true. 🙂

I hope you enjoy the article, let me know your thoughts.