Moving on Up - A Java CAPS Story
I recently had a visit with an interesting company that provides services for healthcare payers, providers, and vendors. Their business encompasses the seemingly contradictory slow IT adoption of healthcare businesses while being an innovator in the web and web 2.0 space.Since this particular entry is very specific to the Java CAPS product, I am going to use some terminology that is also very specific to Java CAPS.
We spent some time discussing how the adoption of GlassFish and NetBeans was accelerating the pace of innovation at Sun and it was agreed by the directors in the group that transparent development brought about by Sun's open source model was a very positive thing to have as long as the commitment to the commercial product was not compromised.
The current release of Java CAPS (Release 6) added a JBI container to the platform. The idea behind adding the JBI container was to provide the product with an extensibility platform. The future potential of the pluggable micro kernel architecture was appreciated. We took the opportunity to point out that Sun was the only major player in the SWI (Software Infrastructure) domain to offer a comprehensive and open platform that could be leveraged with third party vendors and collaborators as well as in house product offerings.(yes, I know it is a cheap plug for Sun. It is also true.)
The JBI container and some of the new components in Java CAPS come straight from the Open ESB community. Open ESB is the project in which new ESB components and capabilities are developed and then they are adopted into the commercial product once they reach a level of maturity that is appropriate to enterprise deployment.
One their largest
concerns was the migration path to Release 6 and beyond. They have made a
significant investment in developing OTDs and services (JCDs and BPs) that
utilize them and want to be assured that their investments will not need to be
thrown away or require major re-working.I was pleased to be able to tell them that virtually all of the projects they had created in CAPS 5.1 would migrate unchanged into CAPS Release 6.
Since they have a mature Java EE developer skill set in the company, they also want to make sure that these skills can be leveraged in the future. They were pleased with the prospect of creating the equivalent of JCDs (Java Collaboration Definitions) using standard MDBs and stateless session beans. They want to be able to use the existing OTDs (Object Type Definitions) in standard EE projects along with the JCA adapters.
Another item that came out of the discussion was that they have a need for a large EMPI (Enterprise Master Patient Index) solution. It is interesting that they were relatively unaware of the eView / eIndex product line in the CAPS 5.x releases. The Sun MDM (Master Data Management) Suite is a direct decendent of the former SeeBeyond Master Patient Index application eIndex. The difference is that now the whole thing has been open sourced under the Mural community. The MDM suite is a bundling of the mural components along with a lot of the other Java CAPS and Sun software products.
All in all it was a positive meeting and I think everyone was happy with the direction in which the Java CAPS product line is heading.
I know this entry is a little preachy and somewhat of an advertisement for Java CAPS. But I did want to share it because there are a lot of Sun's ESB customers using various versions of Java CAPS and it's predecessors and I wanted to show that other companies have the same questions as they do in whether or not to pursue Sun's ESB stack. I think they should.
