Denis’ Blog

Java is a 15 years old language. And 95% of java projects still have bad productivity and many, many, many architectural pitfalls. Too much academic, too much frameworks, too much options, whatever the reasons are, it is demonstrated quite every day.

Some people help us see the light. Of course some of my beloved Java architects here .But in the outside world we can see good design and good execution. Want to be convinced that Java can be done the right way, helping fast features implementation and high scalability at the right cost? A few examples:

• Jive Forums & Clearspace from Jive Software. These guys know their stuff.
• Jira & Confluence from Atlassian
• Alfresco from…well, Alfresco
• Nuxeo 5 from..well, Nuxeo.

And there is one big, big, big site relying on Java: LinkedIn. Maybe the  fact a French designed the beast helped a lot (ok, for soccer it is over for us guys, let us dream that we are software designing the right way ). Have a look at their presentations.

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No Hibernate, Agile methodology and scalability in mind. Great stuff.

BTW: I’ve connected yesterday to Linkedin, it was down for a few minutes. You can’t have 100% availability. Except of course in PHP….. Just kidding :-p.

I’ve just noticed that Hasso Plattner, former founder of SAP AG, has invested in Mindquarry, a interesting open source collaboration solution. The open source market lakes a good collaboration, enterprise ready, solution. Mindquarry can be the missing link.

What amazed me is how fast young companies can build high end solutions:

- In the DMS space, Alfresco (and yes Jean-Thomas, Nuxeo 5 also)
- In the BI space, Pentaho
- In the Supervision and Datacenter Management, Hyperic, Groundwork or OpenQRM
- In the Collaboration space, XWiki
- In the CRM space, SugarCRM
- in the ERP world, OpenBravo
- in the VOIP space, Asterisk
- In the Virtualization Space, Xen
- In the collaboration & Enterprise 2.0 space Mindquarry and Zimbra
- In the Application Integration space Apache ServiceMix, Mule or PeTALS
- In the Portal space Liferay or eXoplatform
- etc, etc..

How can they manage to build so fast so complete solution ?

First, they leverage most of the time existing open source components like Hibernate, JackRabbit, Spring, Dojo Framework to accelerate and industrialize development. They can go faster to what is the key: advanced features and true innovation.

Second, and most important: They understood how to cooperate with a community, and they try to leverage that. Not sure all of them will succeed on the long run, and maybe some of them will leave one day or another the open source model. But it is not important. What is important, is that like the Internet accelerated the changes in the telecom industry, open source is accelerating the mutation of the whole IT industry. New pricing models, more for less. Promising. Exciting