In the same way that I avoid making New Year's resolutions that I'm likely to break, I'm going to forgo the ever present 'predictions for 2008' entry and kick off the year (and this blog) with something I know is happening: our new product releases of FabricServer 2.5 and Studio. You're going to be hearing plenty of information about these product releases in the coming months, so I won't even attempt to give them full marketing coverage in this entry.
However, I would like to focus on just how easy it is to enable applications for the grid with Studio, our new development environment. As many of you know, enabling applications for a grid environment isn't always straightforward. If you're designing a new application, you may have an easier time because you're building in distribution, aggregation, and service-orientation from the ground up. But what about those legacy applications and platforms or COTS software? They've already been architected and may or may not have these principles as design centers. It is in these cases that Studio really shines.
Studio is our Eclipse-based development environment for packaging applications for the GridServer and FabricServer environments. The Studio toolset is great when building applications from the ground up, as its editors and tools work right alongside your familiar Eclipse development environment. When deploying existing applications, Studio's packaging tools drastically simplify the whole process. Studio introspects your application installation and builds a map of the files and directories it finds there. Using this map, it packages your application so that it can be distributed and installed on any supported target OS just as if it were installed natively. Further, when it's time to update or patch your application, Studio uses the map it has already built to determine what needs to be updated and repackaged. Update packaging is done once, and the grid ensures that the update is distributed everywhere.
The excitement about Studio is certainly spreading. Our services team is already using Studio to help customers deploy GridServer and FabricServer faster and more accurately than ever. Our development teams are using it in "skunk works" projects to enable new technologies and platforms for the grid (more to come on this...). I'm even investigating enabling my product and project management software for grid deployment. Sure this is a small step for me compared to the major deployments of our customers, but that's one step closer to getting my infrastructure operating in real time. Not quite a New Year's resolution, but certainly a great way to kick off the year.
