News

Adesso Releases Beta of New Dev Platform

• By Ed Scannell
• June 19, 2006

The company's AdessoNOW Operating Environment Service (OE/S), built on a software-as-a-service model, is designed to reduce the complexity of building applications that can be distributed across Windows environments. Developers can reportedly create both business and consumer applications in 30 minutes, according to company officials.

"The idea is to provide a design capability that allows people to very rapidly build apps that, right out of the box, can take advantage of the distributed database layer built into the product. So if I can build an expense reporting system on Saturday, I can replicate it out to all the users on Sunday," said John Landry, Adesso's chairman and CEO.

Other capabilities of the environment Landry believes will appeal to developers are its replication and synchronization features that are delivered as a service. The environment can deliver not only a range of different data file types to remote users but its associated schema as well.

"Doing distributed is not just a matter of moving data. It is a matter of synching and replicating the design, the access control, the content control rules, and the schema of the database. It all has to be delivered in a synchronized manner so that everyone gets the designed and schema changes just moments before they get the data," Landry said.

AdessoNOW OE/S comes with its own bundled set of development tools. The tools allow developers to create complete applications or just components that can in turn be used with other Web-based components to create composite applications.

"The design objective is to make sophisticated development accessible to mere mortals. So on a plane you can design and develop a portion of an application that an administrator gives you rights to, and when you get off the plane you can send those changes to all users and they receive them the next time they synchronize," Landry said.

Adesso hopes its development platform and tools allow both novice and experienced users to fly at "any altitude" they need to -- meaning they can sculpt applications to exploit any specific layer of a given architecture. They can also extend an application's capabilities through a number of different languages including C#. The tool is compatible with Microsoft's .NET environment.

One systems integrator using Adesso's environment is Chicago-based Leverent. The company is using it to track cattle for mad-cow inspection, and company officials think it is well-suited for their needs because they are always conducting their work in remote area where connectivity is either inconsistent or not available at all.

The company intends to create custom applications it would then sell back to its users, or it could host those applications for them and charge them a subscription.

The new development environment has its own file system, called the Distributed File System, (DFS) that uses Windows-based files. Landry contends the system has many of the capabilities of Microsoft's long-delayed Win/FS file system.

"At its core, WinF/S is a hybridization of database technology with files. So the idea with Adesso is to allow distributed database functionality to be attached to the file system, meaning I can correlate a file with a record in the database," Landry said.

In concert with the OE/S announcement, the company also announced AppsNOW, an online applications marketplace intended to encourage the creation of a community for creating and extending applications using OE/S. The idea is to provide an ecosystem that gives developers a place to sell applications they themselves have created or to work in concert with other developers.

The new marketplace provides an infrastructure for development, hosting and billing for a large number of developers working alone or in teams. The company has also established the Adesso Forum where developers can seek advice from more experienced developers on either technical or non-technical issues.

"This is a pure Web play. You can download the environment from the Web for free, build the applications, and we'll give you a place back on the Web to sell them. And if users download your app using our switch to do so, we'll even send you the check. The idea is to let all the flowers bloom," Landry said.