Powering Web services
Building the foundation for scalable enterprise systems
Follow @infoworldGraham Glass, the chairman and chief architect of Addison, Texas-based The Mind Electric was formerly CTO and co-founder of ObjectSpace. InfoWorld Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell asked Glass about GLUE, TME's popular, Java-oriented Web services engine, and GAIA, a forthcoming product that aims to simplify the deployment and management of large-scale systems comprising many SOAP endpoints.
What's been the progression from GLUE to GAIA?
TME was founded two years ago. We're big believers in service-oriented architectures, targeting the enterprise. Phase one [GLUE] was helping people to build individual services. Then the question is, How do you assemble them into robust, manageable, scalable, reliable systems?
And how do we debug them?
Exactly, and that's something that is rarely talked about. So as people start deploying these systems in the large, software that provides the infrastructure for a true service-oriented architecture -- what I'm calling SOA in a box -- can be fruitful new ground for a company like TME, because that's not the kind of thing application servers are designed to do. So, phase one was to release GLUE, targeted at the Java community, to help them build Web services in the first place. To set the record straight, GLUE is not a toolkit any more so than WebLogic would be considered one. GLUE is now a high-performance application server, when it's used in standalone mode.
All the ingredients except EJB, right?
Right. High-performance servlet engine, Web server, JSP engine, full-blown Web services stack -- the only thing we're saying is that the server-side component model doesn't need to be as complicated as EJB. You can just use regular Java objects. Later in Q1, we'll release native support for clustering, load balancing, and fail-over for any Java object, so you just don't need EJB at all.
And that's separate from the GAIA effort?
Yes, it'll be GLUE
OK, now let's talk about GAIA.
