Mission

Focus on Architecture

Software technologies are usually evolving more rapidly than software systems. Although we firmly believe that Java as a language and a platform will stay with us in the years to come, investment in knowledge to effectively build and evolve software systems will pay-off in the long run. We believe that a key ingredient is to focus on architecture.

Mission: help our customers craft enduring software architectures.

A Brave New Distributed Java World ?

Universal networking through the Internet and the adoption of the object paradigm is leading to the evolution of distributed objects. With Java as a key technology in both the Internet and object worlds, will the realization of these distributed objects be largely Java-based, with CORBA providing the middleware glue ? The above vision stems already from 1996. In real-world projects, learning the hard way, and always keeping an eye on, and experimenting with the latest technologies, we have gained ample experience in building distributed systems both for telecommunication (at AT&T/Lucent) and the Internet since 1985. ISDN, IN, ATM, TINA, OSI, RPC, CORBA, RMI, JMS, EJB and SOAP are acronyms that represent some of the distribution technologies that helped (or hindered!) us along the way. Our current vision is that we apply the technology that best fits a (distribution) problem.

Mission: help our customers building distributed systems with appropriate technologies

Not Just Java

The right tool for the right problem; one size does not fit all; there is no such thing as a free lunch (or a silver bullet). Effective software developers often combine multiple paradigms and technologies. Java technology and the object paradigm were a good fit in projects we did since 1996. We also found that in many of these projects Java was not the right fit for every part of the system, in particular on the client-side (or put the other way around: we found Java the most effective on the server-side). In practice we combined Java with other technologies and languages such as XML, C++, JavaScript, (Dynamic) HTML and more. For example, we have been using XML messaging since 1998 and found this to be very effective in integrating disparate systems. Today a Flash client can even talk XML with a server. We found that many of our customers struggle with decisions on Java technologies and where to apply them.

Mission: help our customers when and where to apply Java and how to mix & match


Just van den Broecke - July 9, 2002 - $Id: mission.xml,v 1.3 2005/11/10 13:55:09 just Exp $