Jolt Winner
Cape Clear ESB Platform
Cape Clear Software
Kristina Rowe, Marketing Programs Manager
Years of application development combined with mergers or acquisitions often leave companies with rigid application silos. Large and distributed project teams make integration a difficult, if not impossible, task to plan up-front. In the quest of more agile approaches to these IT urbanization needs, Software-Oriented Architecture (SOA) came as a much welcomed white knight. SOA went from being just a buzzword, to the approach of choice for companies in need of rethinking and reshaping their IT landscape to better adapt to today's quick evolving business environment.
Like in every good epic, the pursuit of SOA is not easy: In this terra incognita, antipatterns await the most adventurous and many mysteries will need to be solved. Boldly going there unequipped is brave but risky: better select the right tools before releasing the mooring ropes! The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has become the tool of choice for the savvy enterprise architect.
Cape Clear ESB Platform is a state of the art bus that offers a versatile middle-tier: From the low level of transport, routing and protocols support to the high level of service hosting or BPEL orchestration, the platform delivers the RASP (Reliability, Availability, Scalability, and Performance) that is expected from such a critical component. Another key feature of any successful SOA implementation is its monitoring abilities; Cape Clear supports monitoring not only at the bus level (quality of service) but also at the business activity level, helping corporations enforce service-level commitments.
Cape Clear takes the adherence to standards seriously. Beyond the obvious XML-based standards, Cape Clear has recognized the value of a standard IDE integrated studio: based on the Eclipse platform, the development environment will immediately be familiar to most of the Java developers. Comprehensive visual editors streamline the creation of ESB-based projects while sparing the developers the writing of arid configuration files.
--David Dossot
Productivity Award
Liferay Portal
Liferay
This AJAX-laden, Struts-based collaboration portal supplies teams with many of the essential tools necessary to keep teams communicating. Wikis, blogs, message boards, and instant messaging wrapped within a Multilanguage-supported interface capable of hosting numerous portlets (over 60 are bundled with the server), themes and single sign-on with individual user-assigned URL's provide businesses with a flexible Java standards-based web application package. Based on the MIT license, Liferay Portal offers a low-risk test drive of its newest additions including its remarkable ServiceMix JBI (Java Business Integration) engine for scalable integration into other standards-based CRM, ERP, and ECM applications as well as its jBPM (Business Process Model) workflow to further refine content management and routing. And for those who prefer servlets to EJBs, Liferay's use of the Java Spring framework allows an EJB-optional deployment. For those development houses seeking a pure Java portal incorporating the latest standards that Java has to offer, Liferay represents the pinnacle in open-source Java-based portal solutions.
--Mike Riley
Productivity Award
Appistry EAF
Appistry
Has success become a problem? Do you need more computing power to handle your increasing volumes of data to process? Don't take the home-grown farming approach. Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) introduces "scale-out virtualization," an approach that provides scalability thanks to a network of machines viewed as a single system. The underlying foundation, called fabric, provides the many features needed to support the full lifecycle of the hosted applications, including dynamic discovery, self-healing, automatic balancing, distributed shared memory, and rolling updates.
To go further, application developers can leverage specific annotations in their code and benefit from advanced features such as state persistence or connection and transaction automatic fail-over.
--David Dossot
Productivity Award
Pentaho Open BI Suite
Pentaho
One after the other, the bastions of vendor-locked applications are getting sieged as open-source counterparts enter the competition. Pentaho Open BI Suite is the canonical example of what professional open-source achieves at its best: a corporate-grade "free" product complimented by paid-for services.
Built on an infrastructure that provides common services like auditing, security, and logging, Pentaho's platform for business intelligence is a suite of integrated components providing features like reporting, analysis, and data integration. Other features include a workflow engine, a rules engine, and a scheduler.
Pentaho Open BI is released under Mozilla Public License 1.1 and targets the J2EE platform, thus it will fit nicely in your enterprise environment, whatever your target operating system is. As said before, you do not need to go alone: Support, training, and consulting is available right from the source to help ensure a successful roll out.
--David Dossot
