techMusings

ActiveGrid.

Via Mr Udell's blog, saw this on ActiveGrid. I noticed it the last time Jon mentioned the firm, but didn't pay all that much attention -- the fact the name conflicts with ActiveMQ / LogicBlaze products is not good, who knows who got there first.

On the technology page, a few things struck me.

• it only seems to be competing with Java infrastructures. No mention of .NET or ASP at all.
  
• it seems to be trying to spread FUD about Java, by comparing apples to meringues
• Java cannot manipulate Strings directly -- what, it shells out to perl, or something?
• Java means you have to use lots of different connectivity solutions (JMS, RMI, JCA) -- err, they are VERY different technologies in intent and purpose
• java has a lot of overheads for xml because it is strongly typed -- err, these guys don't seem to know much about java, SAX anyone?
  
• old transports bad (ok, they work, are high performance and are well established)
• xml transports good (meaning? REST? WS-*? Indigo? whatever BEA are calling silverstar-mahoogy these days? working? with what database? raw xml to the db, are you serious? I could go on ... )
  
• language neutral services -- great, now i need to train a team to write and debug in a variety of languages? that's a help? I can see that in practice you're going to choose one only for a project, but it's not a huge selling point imho
• database queries in XPath, great
• web forms in XForms... supported by all known browsers

I gave up at this point. Either they don't know what they're doing or, more likely, they got a grad / non-techie to write the docs.

I'm a little disappointed Jon didn't give a more thorough going over. It's great to tout the emergence of LAMP on the enterprise landscape, but this implementation won't help improve it's profile the way it is/is presented.