(September 24, 2007) -  Ted Farrell, chief architect for Tools and Middleware at Oracle, gave the opening keynote at AJAXWorld Conference Expo 2007 West this morning. The next-generation, Web 2.0 user experience, he noted, is as much about empowering users with state-of-the-art social networking tools as it is about a richer interface.

Farrell's theme, Web 2.0 for the Enterprise, led him into the fast-moving world of how the enterprise world is today trying to bring together the various services of Web 2.0 - contact management, search, discussion forums and wikis, presence, VoIP communication, Mail/Events/Calendar, Blogs & RSS  - into one infrastructure in an integrated way. 

Integrating Web 2.0 services into enterprise applications is a quite different challenge to the consumer space, said Farrell. "Enterprises typically have a much slower turnaround on technology, the current technologies are usually older, and so they must have compelling reasons to change, such as market demand/competitive demand, and tangible return on investment. The upgrade path is also a huge factor."

Enterprise applications also generally have a broader set of requirements, explained Farrell.

With so many products and techniques available, Farrell said, it is difficult for organizations to know where to start.

"A framework instead of guesswork is needed," he said, "one that balances both emerging and existing technologies to create a stable rapid application development environment."

Farrell then introduced the notion of a "UI Framework," a way of injecting a level of abstraction, via a declarative UI framework focused on JavaServer faces and JSP.

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