Anyone in the i-technology world engaged in developing, deploying, integrating, or managing software applications knows Borland Software Corporation - BORL as it's known on the NASDAQ - to be the company that above all aims to let clients deploy online applications that are compatible with different platforms.
This gives Borland's president and CEO, Dale Fuller, a unique vantage point from which to comment not just on Java or .NET, but on all manner of current technologies. Fuller also recognizes, along with JDJ, that these days "Everyone from the CIO through to the developer is in the business of software."
Accordingly, this month's JDJ "Question & Answer" session gave Fuller an opportunity, from his corporate world headquarters in Scotts Valley, CA, to deal with a range of issues from ASPs and Web services to SOA, Linux, application life-cycle management, "invisible middleware," and Borland's future role as IT's nearest equivalent to the United Nations - serving all those in the world business of software, no matter what particular brand they may owe allegiance to.
JDJ: We have the basic building blocks and standards in place for Web services, and people are using them. Where do you think we will go from here?
Dale Fuller: We'll need tools that will allow us to put the Web services standards and building blocks to use in a higher-level way. Web services lend themselves to a more business process-oriented approach toward applications and we are going to require development tools that work in this more process-oriented way. This means tools that can visualize the solution at a higher level - think UML models, but UML models that serve as more than just a blueprint, and instead become the basis for the application itself. The software industry must go beyond SDKs and toolkits and toward a higher-level way of building and integra-ting applications.
JDJ: Whatever happened to confuse the meaning of Web services? Do you think that it's because Microsoft focused at the beginning on Web services from the consumer, individual point of view rather than from the back-end IT point of view?
DF: Looking at the origins of the Web services story, you'll see that the "marketing" side didn't embrace the terminology that IT and developers were accustomed to in distributed computing.
The terms that we all understood at the time were things like remote invocation, request brokers, distributed objects, call backs, functions, and APIs. When Web services was introduced, there was a significant emphasis on the "services" aspect of this new technology opportunity. This made Web services appear to be something more magical and dot.com oriented, rather than a simple and practical technology for building networked and distributed applications.
This probably had to do with the timing of the emergence of the technology; remember at the time the SOAP specification emerged, the hot prospect of the day was application service providers (ASPs). I think many in the industry saw a natural fit and wanted Web services to ride the coattails of that wave.
