Jolt Award / Cape Clear 7

Cape Clear has received a Jolt Award. Score!

We also just released Version 7 this week, with spiffy new Eclipse-based tools that make writing, testing and maintaining web services much, much easier coupled with an improved server.

So now, it is time to pause and take stock of where we are and where we want to go over the next year. What seems clear at this point, is that the simplicity of the SOA vision (services, loose-coupling, easy integration) is being corrupted with ever-increasing complexity. It is time to focus on the basics, on problems and their solutions, not technologies and the ever-growing checklist of things a developer supposedly needs to know (see this scary wallchart: WS-*). To quote NTK:

THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.

Eclipse Equinox OSGi R4 on the Server

Finally got a chance to look a the the Eclispe Equinox project. This is an implementation of OSGi R4. OSGi as many people have mentioned over the last couple of years is becoming the dominant model for component life-cycle management (okay lets not mention the debacle of JSR 277). Having used earlier versions of OSGi during Eclipse plugin programming, I really do like the model. It's clean and relatively simple.

What is increasingly apparent is how OSGi is set to become the dominant force on the Server (see this slideset). Why is this? Essentially it is because the days of manually upgrading a server are coming to an end. The cycle where you take a server down, install the newest version and migrate applications, really is looking out of date. Software as a Service (SaaS) is the disruptive force transforming development. However, not all applications (currently categorized as client or server-side) will be delivered as SaaS, but at the very least these applications will need two things: an upgrade capability and the ability to run multiple versions of components together. OSGi  provides both.