The idea of mashups blending BPM 2.0 and Office 2.0 is gaining some traction, as illustrated by this ZDNet article from Dion Hinchcliffe. In order to implement some mashups on my own, I have joined the ever-growing list of Ruby on Rails converts and have opened an account with NetFirms. This ISP offers some of the cheapest hosting with support for the cute programming language that’s taking the developer world by storm. If you want to understand what it’s all about, just take a look at the picture on this article from Assaf, and you’ll realize what might be broken with J2EE. Assaf also kindly directed me to ActiveSalesforce, which is a Ruby on Rails framework connection adapter that provides direct access to Salesforce.com hosted data and metadata via the ActiveRecord model layer. For the BPM part, I will get a copy of Intalio|BPMS 4.0 up and running on a hosted server as soon as we go GA, sometime in March. All I need to do now is find a way to go from BPEL to Rails. More on this soon…