Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
sure there are no license compatibility problems.
And, what is the best language to run the GUI on the client side, and also do the back-end when you are offline??? How many languages should be supported for the part that runs in the browser???
Marc Fleury, the l’enfant terrible of open source, is back from his Red Hat-induced vacation, acting as an adviser to Appcelerator, an Atlanta start-up with a “compelling take on the SOA market.”
Fleury, who sold JBOSS to Red Hat a few years ago and was pushed out a few months after that, told ZDNet he has been helping out at his kids’ school , doing some consulting, and is working with Appcelerator because he “likes the technology.”
He also likes the people, many of whom came from JBOSS, such as new vice president-strategy Ben Sabrin.
Appcelerator’s digs are also just a mile northwest of JBOSS’ offices, and a short drive from Fleury’s Atlanta home, which he decided to stay in after the $350 million Red Hat deal went down. Good for the environment.
What Fleury really called to talk about was the Appcelerator technology, a GPL-ed Message Oriented Architecture enabling AJAX and DHTML without Javascript, creating SOA-based services in any language.
“It’s a true SOA view of the service side. On the client side they differentiate with the open standards appoach,” he said.
The target in this case is Adobe Flex, a proprietary framework for creating Rich Internet Applications, said CEO Jeff Haynie.
“Our belief is there is plenty of great development capability around a standards-based environment, and we don’t need yet-another proprietary language generating a proprietary file inside a browser,” he said.
“We’re using an open standards, open source, and open language approach.”
I joked with Fleury about how previous Atlanta Internet entrepreneurs like Jeff Arnold quickly built new companies (Howstuffworks) immediately after selling their old firms (WebMD) and also built themselves grand Buckhead mansions.
That is not the Fleury way.”I haven’t built a portfolio. I don’t have the interest in managing a portfolio.” He remains what he has always been, a developer. That’s a key difference between the open source boom and last decade’s Internet boom.
UPDATE: The headline is based on an old Hollywood ad campaign, mentioned in a 1992 story about ad man Jerry Della Femina.
