eXo Industry Trends Part 3

SOA and the Web

I had the fortune of spending time with Yefim Natis of Gartner on Friday. I've known Yefim for years as a very skeptical guy with some usually very good insights. He gave a presentation on Gartner's perspective on the cloud, which really crystallized a couple of things for me. One of his graphics is amazingly simple, as most good things are:

Of course when presented it was in build mode. As discussed in Part 2 of this series on the industry trends behind eXo, Java applications are traditionally just the bottom two images - with a transactional, relational database driven back end application and typically some fairly un-interactive web screens.

Yefim maintains that this is the picture the world is heading to over the next 5 years. Richer interfaces for users, and a mix of traditional enterprise apps and new cloud-based services combined at the user experience level. All driven thru a Services Oriented Architecture.

SOA has been so long associated with traditional EAI vendors, but has had a much bigger impact from a Web perspective. Tim O'Reilly coined "Web 2.0" way back in 2004, and is now a core part of almost all consumer web applications. The problem is that many Java shops are still stuck on SOA meaning EAI and are not leveraging the agility in development and deployment this approach brings.

eXo is built for Java shops as a new level of middleware running on top of Tomcat, JBoss, Spring and others that is designed with a consistent services oriented architecture for delivering on this vision. Of course the "Cloud" can be deployed in the enterprise or on a public implementation. As we deliver the eXo Platform V3.0, this will be our core design philosophy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ringside Winding Down

A year ago, a group of us met in a pizza parlor to discuss how we could bring the social web to every website and business. In January, we launched Ringside Networks with seed funding from Matrix Partners, one of the best VC firms in the country. By the end of March we released into open source an initial beta of our Social Application Server – a very ambitious project. We got some very positive reviews on our approach, our implementation and the need in the marketplace for every website to become social. We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact. The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it w
Read more

Capitalism vs. the Three Legged Stool

Image
Wikipedia defines: " Capitalism  is an  economic system  in which trade, industry and the  means of production  are controlled by private owners with the goal of making  profits  in a  market economy ." This definition has always bothered me. I prefer a different model where there is equal recognition of the three primary drivers behind the success of a company: Owners Employees Customers I like to think of it as a three legged stool, where each leg is as important as the other.  One gets too large or small and the stool tips over. The free market is supposed to take care of Employees and Customers.  Employees because the Owners will create so many jobs that due to supply and demand, employees will receive competitive pay.  Customers because if the owners are not building the right thing, then they can go elsewhere. As someone who has helped to build about 10 startup companies now, I have seen the power in making these three stakeholders equal partners.
Read more

Marrakech

Image
I just returned from a great trip to see Allison since she is doing a semester in Toulouse, France her Junior year. It is really cool to see your daughter grow up so well. We did a long weekend adventure to Marrakech. Allison has done a lot of studies about the French colonization of Northern Africa and some of the modern implications of that with immigrants to France. She was also supposed to be taking a course in Arabic, but alas the French are on strike so that class has met rarely. We stayed in a Marrakech Riad - Riad Dar Najat. This is a picture of Allison relaxing on their open lounge area on the top floor. Getting a good Riad is pretty important. Riad's are the equivalent of American Bed & Breakfasts. The streets in Marrakech are lined with walls typically without many windows. It is kind of hot and dirty. You open the door to the Riad and it is like an oasis! Open courtyard to the sky and typically three floors with a couple of bedrooms on each floor and an
Read more