Fiorano to Host a Component Gallery - Software Development Times On The Web

Fiorano to Host a Component Gallery
Borrowing from iTunes, company tries to ease the job of assembling apps
By David Rubinstein

September 1, 2006 — Envisioning a development experience along the lines of Apple’s popular iTunes music store, Fiorano later this month plans to open a component gallery to speed the delivery of applications in a world of distributed computing.

With iTunes, explained Fiorano’s CEO and CTO, Atul Saini, “you can pick off six songs and make an album. Our vision is for you to go to a gallery, and pick off three or four components—all will have XML interfaces—and voil?, you’ve got your app.”

Saini said that an order-processing engine, or a service to return values of stock, for example, would be the types of components or services that a developer could find in the gallery. “These are at a higher level than a [Visual Basic] component,” Saini noted.

Fiorano will host the component gallery “initially,” Saini said, without revealing anything more about hosting. It will be available for use on Sept. 15 in the recently released update to Fiorano SOA 2006, the company’s services integration platform. In that release, native support for .NET was added, improving the Visual Studio integration and making a multiplatform, multilanguage environment available to that pool of developers. The platform now natively supports Java, C, C++ and all the languages associated with the .NET platform, including C# and Visual Basic.

“In .NET, the tools are cooler, but there’s not quite the stability of a Solaris,” Saini said. “People want to develop in .NET and deploy in Linux.”

Fiorano will create the initial group of components, and rely on contributors for others, whom Saini said could set their own pricing for their components. The XML interface allows for simple integration of the components, which can be written in whatever language the contributor prefers.

“XML is expressive enough, and it’s easy to specify,” Saini said. Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) and Java Message Service (JMS) interfaces also will be supported, although Saini pointed out that with Java, there are memory issues when a large number of components are deployed. “C++ is the preferred development language if you want a fast server,” he said.

Saini also said that the C/C++ runtime in its Enterprise Service Bus has been tuned for better performance, and the C/C++ libraries for messaging have added functionality for high availability and clustering, as well as tuned algorithms focusing on flow control.

The one drawback, according to Saini, is putting a neat label on all the new capabilities. “You could have a C# binding to a JCA interface in a C++ runtime on a Java server,” he said. “What do you call it?”

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