Scott Cranton

It is widely known in the IT industry that by taking a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to engineer back-office systems enterprises experience significant flexibility and cost savings, however, SOAs do not address problems surrounding the development and deployment of new applications to front-office end users. To overcome this hurdle, rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks are designed to enable IT organizations to quickly and easily create highly maintainable composite applications that can take full advantage of their new service-oriented infrastructure. This article will discuss what it means to combine SOA and RIA, and provide an overview of the current RIA technology landscape. Additionally, future articles in this series will provide more in-depth technical examples of the various RIA functional areas highlighted below. So What’s an RIA an... (more)

OSGi: An Overview of Its Impact on the Software Lifecycle

OSGi technology brings a number of much needed benefits to the Java enterprise application market, and is disruptive in that it impacts the software development, deployment, and management practices of many organizations. OSGi impacts deployment given the shared, modular nature of OSGi, meaning application code must be written differently to capitalize on the benefits of OSGi. Equally important, application management processes need to be adjusted, given the highly shared nature of OSGi modules across many applications. This article provides a high-level overview of OSGi, and t... (more)

How RIA - AJAX Technology Can Help Linux Seize the Enterprise Desktop

Despite its success in the mid-tier, Linux has not been widely adopted on enterprise desktops - primarily because there is currently very little in the way of standards-based support for developing platform-neutral, enterprise-class GUI applications for Linux. Enterprises will not undertake the major effort required to move applications off of Windows unless they know those applications will be portable - a lesson learned the hard way in the move to Windows over the past decade. In the same way that Visual Basic created a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for Windo... (more)