A Platform For The 21st Century

Nov. 29, 1999 12:00 AM

In 1523 Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro conquered the Inca army and captured the emperor, Atahuallapa, effectively securing the conquest of the entire Inca Empire in a single battle. Remarkably, Pizzaro won the battle with a ragtag team of 168 Spanish soldiers on foreign soil against the 80,000-man Inca army. Pizzaro's astounding victory wasn't the result of a particularly strong military strategy (or moral character).

He was able to overcome enormous numerical odds with a superior technology platform. In his case the technologies were domesticated horses, steel weapons and guns. Pizzaro's victory underscores the awesome advantage created by new and better technology platforms.

While Allaire isn't planning to equip a new wave of conquistadors, we are putting together a new technology platform that will give ColdFusion developers a distinct advantage over the competition. During the past year, Allaire launched one major new product (Allaire Spectra) and acquired two industry-defining companies - Bright Tiger and Live Software. Now we're putting all of these technologies together as an integrated e-business platform.

The easiest way to understand the benefits of this platform is to see it as a set of interconnected services for handling all of the challenges associated with developing Web applications. Each component builds on the other, making the whole stronger while giving you the flexibility to pick and choose the pieces you need.

The Allaire E-Business Platform
It's valuable to take a moment and review the different products and how they work together. The platform has four major components.

Application Server: Not surprisingly, at the heart of the Allaire e-business platform are services provided by the ColdFusion Web application server. You use these every day already, from state management and security to database connectivity. The core services in the ColdFusion server provide a foundation for any e-business application, and the application server services in the Allaire platform are quickly expanding with the new JSP and Servlet technology provided by JRun.

Packaged Systems: On top of ColdFusion, Allaire Spectra 1.0 delivers six new higher level services for content management, personalization, roles-based security, workflow and process automation, business intelligence and syndication. Accessed through some 300 new tags, these services make it significantly easier and faster to build large-scale content and e-commerce applications.

Visual Tools: To productively develop using the services in ColdFusion and Allaire Spectra, the Allaire platform includes HomeSite, ColdFusion Studio and the Spectra Webtop (a very cool browser-based interface for working with Spectra services).

Web Systems Management: The final set of services (yet to be shipped) are management services for application deployment and replication, server monitoring, real-time server maintenance, notification and operational reporting. Based on Bright Tiger Technology, these services will make it easier to manage highly reliable, large-scale production sites.

Key technologies in all four parts of the platform are available today, and a lot more is coming in 2000.

Moving Forward in 2000
The scope of the services across the Allaire platform is expanding rapidly. In ColdFusion Server 4.5 there is new support for Java connectivity, XML parsing and service-level failover. ColdFusion Studio 4.5 includes an entirely new project management system for working more effectively with complex applications. It also has a wide range of new editor features that speed up development, such as split-screen editing and collapsible code.

Moreover, ColdFusion 4.5 runs natively on Linux, expanding the range of operating systems available to you. In 2000 the scope of the application server services will expand significantly with the release of new JRun technologies and the increasing integration between JRun and ColdFusion.

On top of the core products a range of free software development kits (SDKs) and open source technologies are going to make it easier to take advantage of cutting-edge application strategies. For building distributed Web applications that dynamically exchange data between servers, there is a new release of the Web Distributed Data Exchange (WDDX) SDK. Now available on www.wddx.org, the WDDX 1.0 SDK expands support for binary objects in WDDX and adds new functionality that makes it even easier to build distributed Web applications with XML.

The fastest-growing new category of Web browsers, the new microbrowsers, will be embedded in most new commercial cell phones in 2000. There are currently about 300 million active cell phones, many more than PCs, and this market continues to grow. The new wireless Web application SDK that Allaire has developed with Phone.com will give you the sample code and tools you need to build ColdFusion applications that can be deployed to microbrowsers.

Because we believe that working with dynamic content is central to any commerce or enterprise Web application, we're releasing a free SDK for the Spectra content object API (COAPI). The COAPI sits at the heart of the Spectra architecture and gives you a free, incredibly powerful set of tools for working with dynamic content.

While perhaps not as dramatic as the invention of firearms or the domestication of horses, the development of the Allaire e-business platform promises profound changes. For me, there's no better reminder of the impact than the 1,200 developers who attended the first Allaire developer conference. From applications that launch public dot.com companies to systems that revolutionize the operations of established firms, ColdFusion developers are literally inventing the new Internet economy. And we're only just beginning.

About Adam Berrey
Adam Berrey was part
of the original founding team at Allaire. For the last four years he has led the ColdFusion
product management and marketing effort.
As director of product
marketing, he is
responsible for setting product strategy and coordinating product management and
marketing for
ColdFusion, JRun and other infrastructure product initiatives.aberrey@allaire.com