Software AG’s acquisition of Terracotta could be good news for Java developers, particularly those looking at open PaaS alternatives to the more restrictive offerings of Azure and GAE.
In an open letter to the Terracotta developer community, Terracotta CTO Ari Zilka said that the company’s acquisition by Software AG is the first step to building a better cloud; one that apparently will offer language and framework flexibility, along with scalability and application management.
Call it a stack, a platform, a service, or whatever you like. But rest assured, the enterprise application development community – whether you work in Java, .Net, or C++ – will soon have a powerful and exciting new option for building applications in the cloud.
According to Zilka, Terracotta flagship technologies Ehcache and Quartz will remain open source, and also will benefit from the expanded resources Software AG can provide. Ehcache creator Greg Luck has also written that Ehcache will remain open source, and that he will continue his work as spec lead for JSR 107: The temporary caching API.
Two kinds of assets: Technology and community
Terracotta’s acquisition brings both an enriched technology portfolio and a potentially expanded and diversified developer and community base to the enterprise middleware stalwart, Software AG. According to the Software AG press release, Terracotta’s product portfolio of in-memory and distributed caching technologies will be the foundation for its forthcoming PaaS initiative:
The ability to scale the processing of massive loads of data across flexible, modular, geographically distributed architectures will [...] transform Software AG into a full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider.
The press release also carefully acknowledges the value of Terracotta’s open source developer community and related enterprise reach.
Building a better cloud … for developers
While momentum has been growing around PaaS for several years, focus has only recently shifted, or tipped, from the needs of enterprise decision makers to those of software developers. Open PaaS alternatives such as Elastic BeanStalk, CloudBees, and Cloud Foundry all are vying for developer buy-in, mainly by offering the flexible tooling most developers prefer, along with the massive scalability enterprises require.
The two-month-old Cloud Foundry supports a growing number of application frameworks and programming languages. Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, released early this year, also bets on a customizable application environment. And while CloudBees bills itself as a Java PaaS provider, this company too emphasizes freedom from “restrictions and limitations that make no sense to developers.”
Source:http://www.javaworld.com/community/?q=node/7708
