The only constant is change
Dec 8th, 2008 by sharps
The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
— Isaac Asimov
And that, so I’ve been told, was a guiding principal behind the re-architecture of JBoss AS 5.0.0 which was released last week. We don’t know what kinds of applications and services people will be deploying in five years time; we don’t know what frameworks, languages or programming models they’ll be using but we do know that they’ll need to access some ‘core services’ such as data-access, transactions, caching, clustering, messaging, deployment, management, monitoring, etc. And we know we need a modular and flexible core to bind those services together in ways that make sense for the languages and programming paradigms and deployment topologies of the future.
We also know that a single monolithic developer platform for all applications and all customer workloads is not going to be sufficient. At the same time inflicting multiple platforms on the operations organizations who are responsible for the 90% of the application lifecycle that isn’t development is also unreasonable. The operations people see the platform very differently from developers – they don’t want to a new operational footprint everytime a new framework or language comes along – they want stability and consistency.
If this all sounds like vacuous marketing drivel – let’s take a real-life lucid example. Bob McWhirter has been integrating Rails and JBoss using the power of the AS 5 architecture. He’s written some custom deployers, created some shims and a little glue code to integrate existing services and the results are pretty interesting. A powerful Rails environment – without too many compromises for the Ruby developer yet at the same time something that the operations people will be happy with too – ie. a standard JBoss run-time that behaves just like the other JBoss deployments whether they’re Java EE / Seam based or Spring or POJOs. And check out the “web” configuration – another example of what’s not only possible but actually pretty straightforward to acheive with the Microcontainer and modularized services in AS 5.
I think the next couple of years will demonstrate that AS 5.0 has been a wise investment as other vendors will struggle to retool and stretch their run-times to meet customer demands for increased choice and flexibility.
