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Adesso Releases Beta of New Dev Platform
Adesso Systems has delivered a beta version of an integrated development environment
that allows programmers to create and deploy applications that inherently have
distributed and mobile capabilities.
The company's AdessoNOW Operating Environment Service (OE/S), built on
a software-as-a-service model, is designed to reduce the complexity of building
applications that can be distributed across Windows environments. Developers
can reportedly create both business and consumer applications in 30 minutes,
according to company officials.
"The idea is to provide a design capability that allows people to very
rapidly build apps that, right out of the box, can take advantage of the distributed
database layer built into the product. So if I can build an expense reporting
system on Saturday, I can replicate it out to all the users on Sunday,"
said John Landry, Adesso's chairman and CEO.
Other capabilities of the environment Landry believes will appeal to developers
are its replication and synchronization features that are delivered as a service.
The environment can deliver not only a range of different data file types to
remote users but its associated schema as well.
"Doing distributed is not just a matter of moving data. It is a matter
of synching and replicating the design, the access control, the content control
rules, and the schema of the database. It all has to be delivered in a synchronized
manner so that everyone gets the designed and schema changes just moments before
they get the data," Landry said.
AdessoNOW OE/S comes with its own bundled set of development tools. The tools
allow developers to create complete applications or just components that can
in turn be used with other Web-based components to create composite applications.
"The design objective is to make sophisticated development accessible
to mere mortals. So on a plane you can design and develop a portion of an application
that an administrator gives you rights to, and when you get off the plane you
can send those changes to all users and they receive them the next time they
synchronize," Landry said.
Adesso hopes its development platform and tools allow both novice and experienced
users to fly at "any altitude" they need to -- meaning they can
sculpt applications to exploit any specific layer of a given architecture. They
can also extend an application's capabilities through a number of different
languages including C#. The tool is compatible with Microsoft's .NET environment.
One systems integrator using Adesso's environment is Chicago-based Leverent.
The company is using it to track cattle for mad-cow inspection, and company
officials think it is well-suited for their needs because they are always conducting
their work in remote area where connectivity is either inconsistent or not available
at all.
The company intends to create custom applications it would then sell back to
its users, or it could host those applications for them and charge them a subscription.
The new development environment has its own file system, called the Distributed
File System, (DFS) that uses Windows-based files. Landry contends the system
has many of the capabilities of Microsoft's long-delayed Win/FS file system.
"At its core, WinF/S is a hybridization of database technology with files.
So the idea with Adesso is to allow distributed database functionality to be
attached to the file system, meaning I can correlate a file with a record in
the database," Landry said.
In concert with the OE/S announcement, the company also announced AppsNOW,
an online applications marketplace intended to encourage the creation of a community
for creating and extending applications using OE/S. The idea is to provide an
ecosystem that gives developers a place to sell applications they themselves
have created or to work in concert with other developers.
The new marketplace provides an infrastructure for development, hosting and
billing for a large number of developers working alone or in teams. The company
has also established the Adesso Forum where developers can seek advice from
more experienced developers on either technical or non-technical issues.
"This is a pure Web play. You can download the environment from the Web
for free, build the applications, and we'll give you a place back on the Web
to sell them. And if users download your app using our switch to do so, we'll
even send you the check. The idea is to let all the flowers bloom," Landry
said.
About the Author
Ed Scannell is the editor of Redmond magazine.