Snaplogic opens an ‘app store’ for data integration

The folks at SnapLogic opened SnapStore this month, which is a bit like an Apple App Store, for their data integration product. The company’s product takes a platform-neutral approach to data integration, which they prefer to call “data flow.” Generalized to deploy on-premises or in the cloud, SnapLogic components use a REST interface to communicate.

With SnapStore, the company’s open framework allows anyone to build an extension and profit from it.

“So if you have expertise in SAP, you can easily build an API and check it into the SnapStore,” said Gaurav Dhillon, SnapLogic’s CEO. “If somebody wants to use that application, they just buy it from the SnapStore.”

SnapLogic has approached data integration with a product that it says will deploy in just about any environment. It is when more advanced integration is needed - like getting legacy systems to interface with Facebook - that custom tooling needs to be done. Dhillon’s hope is that a developer community will arise to address compatibility with the “jungle of application types” that exists today.

Microsoft making waves with Azure and Dallas at ‘09 PDC

At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) this year, Microsoft made headlines with its new “data marketplace,” Dallas, and surprised analysts with the announcement that Azure would run virtual machines next year.

“Windows Azure’s planned support for VMs with administrative access is a big step forward,” said David Chappell, principal of the Chapell and Associates consulting firm. “It addresses a concern that many customers have.” Continued »

CEP: It’s not just for finance anymore

by Jack Vaughan

This week Complex Event Processing (CEP) software house Aleri Inc. announced that Swedbank had selected Aleri’s Liquidity Risk Manager (LRM) as its liquidity risk management tool. Such tools have continued to flourish despite - or perhaps because of - a worldwide economic slowdown. Earlier this year, Aleri merged with former CEP competitor Coral8.

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Tools add Web services to existing Java EE applications

by Jack Vaughan

“The big technical challenge with using Web services for integration today typically is that you have a number of applications that don’t support Web services,” says Mark Hansen, head of start-up Proxisoft, formerly known as AgileIT. Hansen has created software that, once installed in a Java EE environment, allows you to point and click on classes and methods to create Web services. Continued »

Microsoft buys Teamprise - gains Eclipse plug-in for TFS, VS 2010

By Rob Barry and Jack Vaughan

Microsoft said it will purchase Teamprise, a company that has developed add-ons for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server (TFS). Notably, Teamprise supports Eclipse add-ins, an area that Microsoft has largely ignored. Continued »

Firm to field metadata repository supporting, SOA, WOA, Java and more

Let’s face it, on one level, service-oriented design is an effort to smooth over complexity. Wrapped in the service or at the other end of the service call is some rough hewn software artifact. Finding information about those artifacts is still like hunt-and-peck typing. So much for smooth sailing… Continued »

Aggregate services across multiple cloud domains

Cloud computing and SOA governance provider, Vordel released a new product for aggregating and managing multi-domain services at the VordelWorld conference in Dublin, Ireland this week.

The Vordel Cloud Service Broker (CSB) aggregates services from multiple domains including private, public and community clouds. The CSB registers the services from all three domains into a single repository, which the company says will simplify management, monitoring and policy enforcement. The CSB also includes features for caching, acceleration, analysis and transformation.

The major piece of the CSB is the Multi-Domain Registry Repository (MDDR), which aggregates the services across domains. The MDDR registers services from public cloud offerings from vendors like Amazon and Google along side users’ own on-premises systems so they can be dealt with from a central point.

Glassfish NetBeans highlights

by Rob Barry

Though Oracle has lately worked to quell concerns that it might dump support for Sun Microsystem’s GlassFish application server and NetBeans IDE, many still feel doubtful that any legitimate resources will back the open source tools.

In a discussion on TheServerSide.com, some saw Oracle’s message as perhaps a small comfort rather than a great reassurance. Continued »

As Oracle swallows Sun, MySQL, NetBeans and Glassfish not in danger

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in April, much speculation has surfaced about the enterprise software giant’s commitment to MySQL, NetBeans and Glassfish. At Oracle Open World in October, CEO Larry Ellison tried to quell concerns on both fronts,  claiming each was critical to Oracle’s future.

“If anything, we’re going to invest more in MySQL,” Ellison said at the conference keynote. “Not less.” Continued »

Weirder science: Hadoop and computational biology

Before there was cloud computing, there was grid computing. Instead of sending your jobs to the cloud, you’d send them to the grid. Instead of provisioning big banks of on-premise computers to do your calculations, you’d send them to the grid.
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