November, 2009

Grid yourself for the cloud

Have you heard the one about the private cloud? The IT staff took the “Data Center” plaque off the door and replaced it with a “Private Cloud” sign … oh, and they locked the door too.

All kidding aside, “cloud computing” has been a big story this year. But, like most would-be technology revolutions, it is actually a collection of existing technologies that come together in a slightly new way. Continued »

SpringSource and Oracle back ‘Project Gemini,’ a boost for OSGi

This week, SpringSource and Oracle were named as the first two companies to provide committers to Project Gemini (or “Enterprise Modules”), an Eclipse runtime project meant to bring together a number of modules for enterprise application development. The project was born from the efforts of the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group.

Gemini will, “provide a home for sub-projects that integrate existing Java enterprise technologies into module-based platforms, and/or that implement enterprise specifications on module-based platforms,” according to the proposal on Eclipse.org.

SpringSource says it will contribute two initial projects:

• Gemini Web Container - the OSGi Web Container reference implementation, which is currently housed in the SpringSource git repository.
• Gemini Blueprint Service - a spring programming model for OSGi based on Spring Dynamic Modules.

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.

Continued »

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 »