Views on the Industry

declaration of determination, part 2

(orignially written on 12/12/03)

In order to fulfill the new economic order, one must have fulfilled the channels by which it can come from, by placing the impetus of the end-user in alignment with the requirements of a distributed economy, primed for the delivery of the services marketplace. Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, BEA, Oracle, SAP have all placed their bet on an infrastructure platform, not to mention Siebel, Peoplesoft, Novell, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and all other enterprise vendors. The only space with the upside for all of these vendors is in its delivery of a distributed environment for the use in an inter-operable ecosystem.

By representing the primacy of the J2EE developer in the role this new economy seeks to endeavor, we open the light to innovation of multiple facets. Not only do the competitive functions of the infrastructure battle bring about interoperability within the enterprise environment, but the need for services that operate in this new environment also take hold. Now that we have built an economy, it is time to build a marketplace, and one that can only be delivered by the adherents to the J2EE developer constituency.

I give JBoss all the credit - - they took the chance on community and all the forces were aligned to show how correct they are, and now they can create new paradigm terms like "Professional Open Source" and "Aspect-Oriented Programming" though the latter is common terminology, there is swagger behind its implementation. In the course of events, Marc still has a lot to prove - mainly scalability. It takes an army of Professional Service implementers to cover software spreads, and giving up on innovation for economic benefit is a little recession focused. Again, I can see the benefits of understanding your cash flows, but what is going to happen when the container is not the most cutting edge desgin enviornment?

What may be next is the development of an ecosystem of services that can demonstrate the scalability of the JBoss message. It is nice to be out in front of technological advancement, and it is a necessary element of the economic change to remove the proprietary app server vendors from contention on designing technological advancements, but its going to take another form of the platform to spread beyond the limits of what the professional open source crew can build. The power is in the distribution, and the economics are in volume. By providing the services that can run on top of the JBoss distribution, the ecosystem will enable applications to take form.

What is missing from the emerging Open Source J2EE environment is the services to enable the functionality necessary to carry the message forward. Only the core developers and the few IT personnel that hire them are made aware of the steps that are taken to make J2EE ubiquitous. Its going to require a broader set of tools that demonstrate the business fucntionality usage scenarios with web services integration capabilities. Only when Java can interoperate with .Net and demonstrate that is a superior transport technology will the enterprise investment be real. At present, certain firms are making targeted investments at infrastructure solutions, though not handling business issues. The web of vendors will not take the step needed toward platform integration, and so this will be required of some app market - - in the name of portable components that are the conduit to services.

posted by douglas dooley @ 9:42 AM