At 01:24 PM 9/24/99 -0700, Joel Parker Henderson wrote:
>From: Joel Henderson ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
>
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > What will be the place ND in this new Architecture ?
>
>Hi,
>
>Your question is good, and Sun does need to answer it.
>I will give you some unofficial answers that will help
>reassure you about the future of your development.
Joel,
Whenever I read your posts here, I wonder if ND/Sun management appreciates
what you do for them. Nobody has made the case better than you for all of
us to stay onboard. Unfortunately, nobody from ND/Sun has even attempted
to make the case. This is not just another version upgrade. The ND API
has been declared legacy, and we all need to assess where we are
going. The world is going with J2EE, and we all would have migrated into
it through ND eventually. But (without the sun-netscape alliance) it would
have been with 100% confidence that ND would support the stuff we had built
with the ND framework and ease the way forward for us. Witness the
deployment of jdbc and ejb 1.0 (and now servlets) in ND5. Changing the
underlying code base will introduce risk. No prudent CIO or IT manager
would not hedge his bets, in the absence of firm and specific commitments
from _official_ channels. And the delivery of these commitments needs to
be in the form of phone calls, 1-1 or small group meetings, not exclusively
through press releases, as has been the case to date. I suspect also that
current management does not understand how much Zack Rinatt did to maintain
customer and partner relationships.
Two and a half years ago, when what is ND4 was being designed, there was a
series of regional all-day meetings where customers and partners signed
non-disclosure forms and the features and architecture were explained,
input sought, and concerns addressed. This is the sort of thing that
should be happening now, as part of a customer retention marketing effort.
ND/Sun seems to be proceeding on its timetable without much thought to
the fact that customers have to make decisions well in advance of the
release of the new products. Decisions like whether to send people to
training in the ND API, if we might be building everything using J2EE. Or,
if our apps will need to be rewritten in J2EE, because it will be easier
then trying to keep them in the ND API, when do we select our IDE and
deployment environment (which might or might not be iPlanet). You might
well be correct in your confidence that we will be able to run our existing
apps under the new server without much rewrite, but if we are not
confident of this ourselves, there will be some date at which we will need
to make other plans in order to meet our objectives. There is a risk that
we will gain confidence in iPlanet only after we made a decision to go in
another direction.
A few more comments appear below.
-- Curt, Team ND
>Sun does own both NetDynamics and Kiva, a.k.a. the Netscape App Server.
>
>Both existing products will continue to be supported for years, and anyone
>who has purchased ND5 has a support contract that officially states this.
>Our entire tech support staff is intact, and is led by Jim Fitzgerald,
>who has worked at NetDynamics for years. Jim's team is 100% dependable.
>You can be completely confident that your existing projects are safe.
>
>Similarly, every single one of the core NetDynamics engineers is
>staying with Sun. In fact, they have just completed the new rev
>of NetDynamics, which includes enhanced support for new Java
>standards and also fine-tunes hundreds of developer requests.
>You can download it at http://www.netdynamics.com/download/
Many of us have confidence in the ND crew. Their continued participation
should be emphasized in a customer retention marketing plan.
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>For the next major revisions of NetDynamics and Kiva, the Sun/Netscape
>Alliance will merged both products into a unified Alliance app server.
>This may be called something like the "iPlanet Application Server".
> From everything I have heard, the iPlanet App Server will have a
>smooth upgrade path for all existing NetDynamics and Kiva projects.
>
>The iPlanet App Server will use source code from both ND and Kiva,
>with its code base from Kiva because the Netscape engineers know
>Kiva better. For our customers, it doesn't really matter what the
>code base is, because a code base is internally only-- for example,
>you have never seen the code base of NetDynamics, because we give
>you nice clean APIs for accessing NetDynamics features. The same
>is true of Kiva, and will be true for the iPlanet App Server.
>
>To be perfectly clear, the code base does not matter much.
>
>What does matter is the APIs, and related things like the app
>server event model. I expect Sun to do a fair job of supporting
>the existing NetDynamics API and event model, while also providing
>a much-improved API and event model that makes it easier to develop
>things like J2EE projects. This is something that we have wanted to
>build into NetDynamics, and it will be a great aid to developers.
I find it troubling that the code base was selected based on the
convenience of the Netscape engineers, as opposed to the strengths or
weaknesses of the two existing code bases. You yourself have been one of
the biggest boosters of the ND standards-based architecture. Yes, in
theory, you can go from one code base to another, and maintain the APIs,
but, in real life, stuff breaks. As of ND4, ND achieved a stable
architecture, based on corba. Conversions from ND2->ND3 and ND3->ND4 were
a bit painful. But the conversion from ND4->5 was a breeze (at least in my
experience) even though you added a whole new service (ejb) and swapped in
the jdbc service in place of the rdbms service. I am not as confident as
you seem to be that changing the code base will not affect stability,
especially in the first release. And you're from Missouri, not me!! (note
to international readers, Missouri is known as the "show me" state) (Joel,
I'll let you say what you will about my state :-) ).
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>If you are already thinking about things like J2EE and the release
>of the iPlanet Application Server, there are some programming tips
>that can help make your code more portable and more effective.
>All of these tips are basically good programming practices,
>and really everyone here should be doing all of this already.
>
>First, write reusable object oriented code. For example, if you
>have various projects that have multiple copies of the same code,
>or lots of similar code, then you should generalize the code and
>combine it into one Java package, then import the package into
>your NetDynamics project using "import com.mycompany.foo"
>
>Second, move NetDynamics SPG code into business logic objects.
>Good programming design will have all your business logic in
>separate classes and packages, and you can then include these
>classes and packages on your particular NetDynamics pages.
As you know, thanks to my incessant ranting, I have done this in a big
way. I'm not sure I want to recommend that people rework existing ND
projects in this way, in advance of a complete decision for the
project. You can isolate your business logic, but then you will have to
deal with how to get to it from the page, should it be static routines,
instantiated objects, all that. It's non-trivial. For an app that is
going to run for the long-term, it might make sense just to rewrite it
completely in J2EE, using the standard building blocks, instead of trying
to restructure it in the context of the ND API.
>Third, write your objects using Java Bean functions like getFoo()
>and setFoo() instead of just directly accessing class variables.
>You can see the JavaBean specification for more detail. This will
>be especially useful for developers who want to start using things
>like Java Bean Boxes for visual rapid application development.
>
>Fourth, start reading about J2EE. This will include information on
>Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java Servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP),
>and how Sun and Java are headed toward new industry-wide standards.
>We fully expect J2EE to be adopted by all major application servers,
>even the app servers that compete with NetDynamics and Kiva/NAS.
>For a good start, see http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview2.html
strongly agree!
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Another very important aspect of the NetDynamics future is the
>smooth integration of our NetDynamics employees into the Alliance.
>As some of you know, this has been a challenge for Sun and for
>Netscape, because NetDynamics is wholly-owned by Sun whereas
>Netscape is split between Sun and AOL. This is a managerial
>and administrative challenge, and has been difficult.
>
>I think we are very close to solving this, and in fact we are
>moving this week from the NetDynamics building to the Netscape
>buildings. We also have a top-notch head named Joe Keller,
>and I think he will be a very good leader to get us integrated
>into the Alliance quickly, smoothly, and effectively. These
>improvements are important to us internally, and will have
>long-term benefits to our customers and also to our partners.
I think it is heartening that the ND crew is sticking around. They are
very smart and dedicated people.
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Finally, if you are concerned about the future of NetDynamics,
>a very good rule of thumb is that no company ignores big money--
>and our customers have a *lot* of money invested in NetDynamics.
>Sun will absolutely ensure that these customers are supported.
>
>NetDynamics is landing multi-million dollar deals from Sun's
>largest customers of both hardware and software, and NetDynamics
>is the best-selling product in the entire Sun/Netscape Alliance.
>NetDynamics has about five times the customers of Kiva, with five
>times the revenue, five times the installed base, five times the
>support contracts, and five times the consulting partners.
>Sun and Netscape are smart enough to protect this investment.
Sometimes I wonder.
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>If you have other questions about the future of NetDynamics,
>the most important thing is to make sure that you let us know.
>You can email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and I'll forward
>questions on to the right people in our marketing, support,
>and engineering. Our customers are very important to Sun,
>so let us know what you want and need, and we'll listen.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Joel Henderson
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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