brightlineSaturday, January 31st, 2004 :: by jonvon
the vendor that definitely stuck out the most to me at the Lotusphere Product Showcase was far and away Brightline. these guys are doing what we've all wanted someone to do since garnet got axed way back when.
it might be no surprise then that the guys who make up the Brightline team are former members of the ranks of Iris and Lotus, and in fact are some of the guys that were on the garnet team.
for instance, steve brown, the guy who was the garnet product manager at Iris, (please correct me if i am wrong) is at brightline. he's listed as an engineer on the brightline company overview page. he was the first guy i talked to at their booth, mainly because i knew him from a jumpstart on java that he did at the lotus devcon in 2001 in las vegas. actually i think he did a couple of them, and also ran the BOF for the java guys. at that time i was just getting my feet wet with java and steve's presentation (along with gary devendorf) really helped. steve, like gary, is one of those guys who can explain it to anyone, beginner or whatever. a real smart guy.
ok, so why is Brightline cool?
also from what i can tell, this requires ND6.
ok, so after seeing the vision for IBM's portal server, workplace and so forth, suddenly plain old j2ee doesn't sound so cool. IBM / Lotus is working hard to abstract a lot of the complexity in j2ee away from us so that we don't have to spend the next ten years mastering MVC (model view controller) patterns and writing crappy applications in the meantime while we get good at this stuff.
guess what? Brightline is coming out with a portal server too. i already saw it demonstrated at lotusphere. they quietly announced it, i think on tuesday. they have already written about 20 portlets, all created with solid MVC architecture. more are on the way and they will be integrating lotus instant messaging along with AOL / AIM, etc., into many of the portlets. all that kewl awareness stuff and all.
they have internet-related portlets that connect to news sources so you can pull in news feeds. and lots of other stuff. they have intranet-related portlets for domino mail and so forth. they are covering the bases pretty well, seems like.
and the best part is, all of the portlet code is open source, once you have bought their portal server. so if you want to see how to construct a solid j2ee application, you can poke around in their code to get a good idea.
the portal server runs on top of the Domino Express server. according to Jim Wilson, you can get a portal server up and running for under $10,000 (not including hardware). not too bad at all!
for a lot of shops, this will definitley be the best path to take. not to mention the cheapest, to integrate j2ee and domino. a lot of bang for the buck here. no eclipse rich client or anything, it certainly isn't a complete replacement for (the upcoming) workplace, but if you want solid j2ee on your server running like, next week, then Brightline might just be for you.
one more cool thing, i was talking to melissa about this, i think when we were at the penumbra thing. she says that ddn is looking into partnering with the brightline guys somehow, so we may end up seeing this running in our environment. who knows, us ddn guys and girls could all turn into brightline enthusiasts. how cool would that be? i bet some people would sign up at ddn just to be able to check out the brightline tools. hey, it could happen!
more on brightline:
Finally, somone has integrated J2EE into Domino in a way that works -- but it wasn't IBM, by andrew pollack. andrew has already rewritten his NCT Search for java using Brightline / j2ee technology. from what i understand he's written it using java's multi-threading capability and it is supposed to be wicked fast.
What didn't make the story..., also on andrew pollack's blog.
it might be no surprise then that the guys who make up the Brightline team are former members of the ranks of Iris and Lotus, and in fact are some of the guys that were on the garnet team.
for instance, steve brown, the guy who was the garnet product manager at Iris, (please correct me if i am wrong) is at brightline. he's listed as an engineer on the brightline company overview page. he was the first guy i talked to at their booth, mainly because i knew him from a jumpstart on java that he did at the lotus devcon in 2001 in las vegas. actually i think he did a couple of them, and also ran the BOF for the java guys. at that time i was just getting my feet wet with java and steve's presentation (along with gary devendorf) really helped. steve, like gary, is one of those guys who can explain it to anyone, beginner or whatever. a real smart guy.
ok, so why is Brightline cool?
- the j2ee container they are using is JBoss. this is an open source, commercial grade, fast j2ee container. very neat that they chose this one, and cost effective as well since it is free. it also apparently utilizes tomcat, i'm assuming for stand-alone servlets / jsps, from what i've read.
- the setup process takes about 15 minutes, although steve was careful to point out that it is important to read the directions. setup takes 15 minutes if you read the doco. otherwise it could take a lot longer...
- compare this to something like portal server where the installation can take something more like a week... i realize this isn't apples to apples, and hopefully workplace will have some good admin tools wrapped around it at some point. but the point is, installation is supposed to be pretty easy to do, way easier than anything ibm is currently shipping in this space.
- it is cheap! only $2,500 gets you a licensed server. according to this crn article, Brightline Promises Easy Domino/J2EE Coexistence, the footprint isn't real bad either. i guess if you are running on a pretty beefy box, you can run them both there and everyone is happy. no extra boxes to buy, maybe. i haven't tested this in production or anything, but i have a feeling we could do it.
- the administration of the j2ee applications that you write is handled in a very familiar environment - inside a notes database! ear files, webxml, all that stuff is managed in the good old secure Notes client. so you can control access via an ACL. for domino folk, you really couldn't ask for more.
- according to their site, you can run JSP's, servlets, EJBs, and JMS (Java Messaging Service), and a bunch of other stuff (look toward the bottom of the page for bullet points).
- one more thing, you can redeploy code via the domino admin db instantly without having to restart any servers. freaking nice. if you have ever written servlets for the native domino environment, you know that you have to restart a few things to get code to run. in R5 this includes the http task. which means all your users lose their session info on that server. can be a pain...
also from what i can tell, this requires ND6.
ok, so after seeing the vision for IBM's portal server, workplace and so forth, suddenly plain old j2ee doesn't sound so cool. IBM / Lotus is working hard to abstract a lot of the complexity in j2ee away from us so that we don't have to spend the next ten years mastering MVC (model view controller) patterns and writing crappy applications in the meantime while we get good at this stuff.
guess what? Brightline is coming out with a portal server too. i already saw it demonstrated at lotusphere. they quietly announced it, i think on tuesday. they have already written about 20 portlets, all created with solid MVC architecture. more are on the way and they will be integrating lotus instant messaging along with AOL / AIM, etc., into many of the portlets. all that kewl awareness stuff and all.
they have internet-related portlets that connect to news sources so you can pull in news feeds. and lots of other stuff. they have intranet-related portlets for domino mail and so forth. they are covering the bases pretty well, seems like.
and the best part is, all of the portlet code is open source, once you have bought their portal server. so if you want to see how to construct a solid j2ee application, you can poke around in their code to get a good idea.
the portal server runs on top of the Domino Express server. according to Jim Wilson, you can get a portal server up and running for under $10,000 (not including hardware). not too bad at all!
for a lot of shops, this will definitley be the best path to take. not to mention the cheapest, to integrate j2ee and domino. a lot of bang for the buck here. no eclipse rich client or anything, it certainly isn't a complete replacement for (the upcoming) workplace, but if you want solid j2ee on your server running like, next week, then Brightline might just be for you.
one more cool thing, i was talking to melissa about this, i think when we were at the penumbra thing. she says that ddn is looking into partnering with the brightline guys somehow, so we may end up seeing this running in our environment. who knows, us ddn guys and girls could all turn into brightline enthusiasts. how cool would that be? i bet some people would sign up at ddn just to be able to check out the brightline tools. hey, it could happen!
more on brightline:
Finally, somone has integrated J2EE into Domino in a way that works -- but it wasn't IBM, by andrew pollack. andrew has already rewritten his NCT Search for java using Brightline / j2ee technology. from what i understand he's written it using java's multi-threading capability and it is supposed to be wicked fast.
What didn't make the story..., also on andrew pollack's blog.
discussion thread| 1 |
2/18/2004 7:43:30 AM
I believe Joseph Millar is at Brightline too, and he seems like a great guy: really helpful over at the LDD.
He's very patient with Java norks like yours truly too...
o)
| 2 |
2/20/2004 10:12:33 AM
i think you are right ben
i seem to remember that from Lotusphere, but i can't exactly remember why.
java norks! we should start a club. ;-)