Archive for September, 2010

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What is eXo Platform 3.0? (Part 1)

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

eXo has been known for its portal since the day we delivered the industry’s first implementation of the Java portlet spec 1.0 (JSR-168). Last year, we merged our portal development with Red Hat’s JBoss portal project, and have worked closely with them to deliver GateIn.

Our customers, prospects, and other industry insiders all want to know: What is eXo Platform 3.0?

I’m going to take the next few posts to explain exactly what it can do.

First, eXo Platform 3.0 is a foundation for portal-based applications. With GateIn underpinning eXo Platform, it can do everything that you expect from an enterprise portal.

The word “portal” may be considered outdated in some circles, but Java developers know that a portal is a proven standard for building an intranet or website that can integrate additional application functionality. These customizable functions can be exposed as portlets, while features like access control and single sign-on provide security. And portals provide excellent functionality for personalization and federation.

The fact is, these portal functionalities are still critical. Our customers tell us they want to add rich user experience features to their intranets or websites (and we’ve got that, with eXo services that add activity streams, social networks, chat, forums and answers) - but they don’t want to risk the security of their enterprise infrastructure by implementing standalone “social” apps.  With eXo Platform, you no longer have to choose between these sexy new features and the proven reliability of a portal.

That’s why we say eXo Platform is a portal and much much more. Stay tuned for the next post where I’ll de describing what else you can do with eXo. (Or if you can’t wait, read our white paper on eXo Platform.)

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Posted in Use Cases | 3 Comments »

Java Developers: Start Your Engines

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Interesting post last week from James Governor of RedMonk with an eye-catching headline: “Web Drives Strong Demand for Java Skills.”

Anyone who’s followed eXo knows that we’ve always been bullish on Java in the enterprise. In fact, we are leveraging web technologies to make Java systems even better. Yes, the web has passed Java by with more richness, interactivity, and a much better user experience. But Java is still a robust enterprise ecosystem with billions of dollars invested. It’s still a place for innovation. Our question to Java enterprises is simple: Why throw it all out?

A while ago, we were talking to some analysts about an inquiry they’d received from a client: A very large Java shop wanted to do something with their Java apps — make them more modern, refresh them, add document management, collaboration capabilities. The advice they were given: Try SharePoint.

Not practical, to say the least.

This is a pain point we’ve seen time and again with our customers over the years. While the Java middleware leaders totally focused on scalability and efficiency of controlled, self-hosted relational database applications, they’ve missed the boat on many things: user experience, content as data, social features, more personal control.

We’ve been talking about eXo Platform 3.0 for a while now. It isn’t an “open source SharePoint,” like others have claimed (either for themselves or for us). It’s a portal (a word that seems to be taboo these days but Java developers know what we mean) and much much more. It’s Java’s own SharePoint. It’s about reusability of Java components; mixing and matching of relational data and content; publishing, sharing, and collaborating on data and content across many places — website, intranets, enterprise social networks.

We’ve been showing off some of these capabilities over the last few months:

Java’s about to be supercharged. And the Java developer’s life is about to get much easier.

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Posted in Industry Trends | 2 Comments »

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