Archive for November, 2010

eXo IDE and RESTful architecture

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

I’ve been working on a demo that will show how to use the eXo Platform 3 IDE to build an iPhone web application. You can see the sample app in action in this video, or read the tutorial to learn how to build your own – both of which were added to the eXo Resource Center today. I built this demo app in order to show two things:

- First, how using REST services allows you to decouple the UI from the data layer.

As more and more heterogeneous devices are used to browse the web, we are witnessing an architectural shift in application architecture. Separating the data interface from the user interface allows you to have multiple front-ends and can give third parties the opportunity to build their own app on top of your API. REST services expose the data on one side, while Ajax allows the browser to rewrite the page on the fly. With HTML5 features, the browser is even more powerful, and server-side native code is less and less relevant. In my demo, I used jQtouch, a jQuery plugin for mobile development, in order to build an iPhone interface. It is easy to imagine how fast it would be to build an iPad or Android interface for the same app.

- Secondly, how the eXo Platform 3 IDE helps developers leverage this architecture.

Writing, testing and deploying REST services is greatly simplified with the web-based IDE in eXo Platform. Using Groovy scripting language, the code is dynamically compiled and can interoperate with all the existing eXo services written in Java. The JAX-RS API uses annotations to greatly simplify the development of RESTful web services. Finally, the build and deployment phase is reduced to one simple click, and your application server doesn’t need to be restarted. This gains time and energy for developers to focus on more valuable things, such as improving the end-user experience.

The IDE opens-up new prospects for eXo developers to explore. Check out the new video demo and tutorial and let me know what you think. For further reading, check out Mike Loukides’ article: New directions in Web Architecture.

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Tags: , ,
Posted in Tech Talk | No Comments »

Attending RIRI in Paris next week? Check out the eXo booth!

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

For those of you who are heading to “Rencontre Internationale des Responsables Intranet” (the International Meeting of Intranet Managers) in Paris next week, be sure you stop by the eXo booth. I’ll be coming in from our Tunis office, joining Marc Brassier (from our Paris office), 1-2 December at L’Automobile Club de France.

We’ll be meeting with our customers, partners, and others who want to learn about using eXo Platform 3 to build modern enterprise intranets with social and collaboration features. As the first and only user experience platform for Java, eXo Platform 3 provides many capabilities required for an intranet out-of-the-box, yet it can be extended easily with custom APIs to integrate with existing apps.

eXo’s technology is already being used to build collaborative, portal-based solutions for many customers in Europe, from e-government portals to enterprise intranets for telecom, finance, insurance and other industries. These customers chose eXo because they needed a flexible, scalable way to integrate third party applications, improve collaboration, and provide complete web content and document management tools – all within the trusted security of an enterprise portal.

If you are in attendance, please come by and introduce yourself. We’d be happy to share a little more about what our customers are doing with eXo, answer any questions, or give you a live demo of eXo Platform 3. Hope to see you there!

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Events | No Comments »

eXo CEO Ranks Among France’s Top 100 IT Influencers

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Last week, 01 Informatique, the leading IT publication in France ranked eXo founder and CEO Benjamin Mestrallet one of the top 100 most influential and important IT people in France. Benjamin held his own alongside Julien Codorniou of Microsoft and good friend of eXo, Bertrand Diard of Talend. This honor is the latest to call attention to Benjamin’s leadership and his focus on building eXo over the last 8 years.

Back in October 2008, Benjamin was awarded the prestigious IVY Award, an annual accolade presented to an exceptional candidate under 35 from the technology sector who shows great promise and leadership. Even better, the IVY Award recipient was selected by a jury of top French IT leaders. In addition to these honors, eXo under Benjamin’s leadership has received broad recognition for its technology, including selection as a 2009 Gartner Cool Vendor.

Earlier this year, eXo closed its first-ever financing round, and accelerated operations in the U.S. It’s been a wild ride, with some significant achievements in the last year. Today we celebrate all of these accomplishments with our fellow French compatriots at the La Soirée annual fundraiser hosted by the French American Chamber of Commerce. It will be a chance to drink, be merry and share in the harvest along with other French and American business leaders who have supported Benjamin and eXo along the way.

Félicitations Benjamin!


Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Tags:
Posted in Company News, Industry Trends | 2 Comments »

eXo Around the World

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

The launch of eXo Platform 3 was a very important milestone for the company, and I had the opportunity to take the news international, thanks to our partner Red Hat. Here are some highlights from my trek.

My world tour kicked off in September at the Red Hat APAC Partner Conference in Bali followed by a trip to the Red Hat offices in Singapore.

In Indonesia, I was able to decompress (it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it!) on the beautiful beaches. But it wasn’t all play and no work; it was a great chance to demo two years of hard work: eXo Platform 3.0 during a Red Hat “Partner Success Story” session (and as you know, we are just getting starting!). The reaction was a constant “Awesome!” from anyone who saw the eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss in action.

During both legs of the trip, I met with management teams and potential partners that could enhance the JBoss/eXo network already in place.

One of the companies I met with was a global technology services company that builds solutions, many based on Oracle and IBM, for clients in the banking and insurance industries. The services companies and partners were asking for open source alternatives because their margins were getting thinner and thinner due to competition. The services company really liked the breadth of the eXo Platform, which had document and content management with full standard Java enterprise portal features that could be also used to integrate many applications — all priced affordably.

In October, I attended the GITEX Technology Week in Dubai where eXo shared a booth with our Red Hat Middle East team. This was the second time eXo has made an appearance at this conference, which is widely recognized as the region’s largest and most popular technology retail event. With an estimated 150,000 attendees, the opportunity to network certainly kept me busy.

While in Dubai I joined Red Hat several meetings with major companies in the Gulf region interested in leveraging a portal platform to update their existing Java systems. They were particularly interested in the eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss (for social, content, collaboration and knowledge) to extend their applications.

Although entering this region is challenging to enter as a small technology provider, we were able to fix some meetings with local organizations that found the flexibility of our platform to be very appealing. All the governments in this region are promoting open source. For them, open source isn’t about cost only but also a driving force for innovation.

The seeds we’ve planted throughout the region are bearing fruit; we are happy to announce that the Tunisian Congress (Chamber of Deputies) has chosen eXo Platform to build their site, which is scheduled to go live shortly.

My next big trip will take me to Brazil where I’m excited to meet with the Red Hat team in Sao Paolo and partake in our first public training in the country, which includes certification on eXo Platform 3. Brazil is one of our top five most active markets in terms of downloads of our community offerings, and we’re already seeing healthy traction with customers, including the Brazilian bank Caixa.

I am sure I will have more to share when I return from Brazil.

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Posted in Company News | No Comments »

Notes from the Enterprise OpenSocial Interop Fest

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Last Thursday, I attended the Enterprise OpenSocial Interop Fest in Palo Alto on behalf of eXo. We have been among the earliest adopters of OpenSocial as part of our vision to provide modern social features for enterprise Java applications.

The Interop Fest focused on demonstrating the portability of OpenSocial gadgets across enterprise containers. Along with eXo, enterprise vendors such as IBM, SAP, Cisco, Atlassian, Paypal, Jive and Liferay participated in a “hack-a-thon” style workshop to try out different gadgets and enterprise containers.

Although OpenSocial originated as a way to easily build apps for consumer social networks, its importance to enterprise application development is increasing. First, the “gadget” standard emerged as an efficient way to tackle enterprise concerns like aggregation, customization and personalization. As its popularity as an easier and faster development method increases, more enterprise considerations will have to be addressed.

Of primary importance to enterprises is interoperability – and this seems to be going in the right direction with the new PubSub2 feature of the forthcoming OpenSocial 1.1 specification. Inter-gadget communication should allow enterprises to build highly interactive mashups made of multiple components.

Another important concern discussed at the meeting is portability. An effort is now being made to identify compliance levels and provide a Compliance Test Suite. This will become crucial as OpenSocial introduces more advanced features in future versions, while many enterprise containers are still implementing older versions of the specification.

Hopefully, these efforts will encourage more enterprise developers to adopt OpenSocial. And as the pool of enterprise gadgets expands, OpenSocial containers will become a more relevant and efficient way to build business-oriented dashboards.

Another meeting is planned for January 2011 to follow up on these issues, and you can find Thursday’s meeting notes here.

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Posted in Events | No Comments »