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When we made the decision to acquire FeedHenry last fall (almost a year to the day) – we wanted to be sure we were getting behind the future generation of mobile platforms and not trying to compete in the past. FeedHenry’s cloud-native mobile platform is focussed on developing and deploying the back-end (wiring data-sources and services) while keeping the front-end app. development open to customer choice. It’s also a first for Red Hat for a product line supporting node.js as the runtime for developing application logic. JavaScript on the front-end and the back-end is pretty powerful and a mobile platform that doesn’t support that would be pretty limiting today.

More validation of our choice comes in the form of Forrester’s recent report – “Mobile Infrastructure
Services, Q3 2015″ – diagram shown below.

Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which AnyPresence, Kony, and Red Hat lead the pack. Appcelerator, Kinvey, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP offer competitive options. MobileSmith is a market Challenger.

Now that FeedHenry is part of Red Hat and the integration with Red Hat’s broader cloud and middleware portfolio is progressing that Red Hat Mobile Application Platform’s market presence will improve considerably and Red Hat will advance further up and to the right .

Red Hat has moved into this market through acquisition of FeedHenry, and is quickly moving to connect its backend-as-a-service offerings to Red Hat’s own extensive set of integration tooling, JBoss Fuse.

Congratulations to the Red Hat Mobile team – this is a great way to celebrate the first anniversary !

… Heroku finally got around to supporting Java. But they couldn’t do it without first piling on some hate.

Why then, if Java is such a miserable platform to develop on would Heroku bother ?

Here are a couple of thoughts :

1. Huge Developer Base

2. Massive Adoption

Screen Shot 2011-08-26 at 4.22.48 PM.png

3. Large, Active Ecosystem

Only Java gives developers such a broad range of tools, technologies and APIs – both commercial and open source. Only Java gives you Open Standard enterprisey features like Transactions, Object Persistence, Messaging, Security, Integration, scalability and high availability for when you need them.

Basically, most professional developers use Java (if they aren’t beholden to Microsoft that is) and they, to a degree, decide how to spend money on deployment and long-term care and feeding of applications. And Heroku, like any other company wants to make money.

But why would a professional Java developer choose Heroku given their very out of date and poorly informed opinion of Java ?

Surely – Red Hat’s OpenShift is a better choice ? Instead of whining about Java’s shortcomings over the years – Red Hat / JBoss has put a huge amount of energy in fixing Java’s shortcomings – and doing it in an open and collaborative way so the entire ecosystem can benefit. Red Hat has a deep understanding of Java technology and open collaboration – more than anyone else in the industry. OpenShift’s support for Java EE 6 is a recent example of this – we didn’t sit around complaining that Java EE didn’t fit with the new deployment paradigm that PaaS represents – we simply did what we had to do to make it work. And you can try it for free.

Finally, as Isaac makes clear, it’s time for the folks at Heroku to wise up about Java and maybe trade in their 2004 copy of “Beginning J2EE 1.4: From Novice to Professional” and have a look at some of the advancements in Enterprise Java over the last decade. Hey – Adam – leave a comment and I’ll buy you a new book 🙂

Red Hat a leader in Mobile Infrastructure Services

With all the enthusiasm of cleaning up a dog turd …