Enabling Service-Based Application Development Through Social Objects

Software development is typically a social activity; development is most often performed by a team of people who must collaborate effectively. Application development enablers, such as web services and their APIs, can be viewed as social objects that can be interacted with just as one may interact with other people in the context of a social network. Extending enterprise social network applications and ecosystems to include API's and applications as first-class objects will have a significant impact on the social and technical processes through which enterprises develop service-based applications. In this paradigm application enablers can be tagged, followed, searched/discovered, and discussed across the enterprise development community. This paper presents a prototype framework architecture, design model, and usage scenario that exemplify this approach.