Enterprise Literate Technology – Repost

This is a repost of a blog at nexj.com that I thought might be of interest to the community. Thanks, Ed

Why do our Enterprise teams need to know so much about low-level technology when providing a business solution? The big reason is that the Enterprise environment in which we live is complex. We have many systems that were built at different times, when different technologies and practices were fashionable, and we need to make them talk to each other and share information. We then need to connect and use their capabilities as if all the information was native. We also have many ways of presenting that information to end-users, and this continues to evolve. When integrating software in a truly Enterprise environment, it takes a lot of know-how to make that software ‘fit in’ and keep it relevant and current.

Isn’t it about time that our software started to know a bit more about us, rather than the other way around? Isn’t it about time for Enterprise Literate Technology rather than having to be such a Technology Literate Enterprise?

That’s been one of our main motivations. To give you a starting point and expressive domain specific language to use when creating business solutions and dealing with other systems. Not just providing low-level tools, but with an abstraction of your business environment. A language with which to represent their capabilities; how to connect to them; how to properly reflect security; and so much more. We bring things up a level so you can design declaratively – saying WHAT you want the system to do, not HOW. We help you manage complexity – both functional and technical.

For example, you can declare that you want to store some information in a database, without having to say it will be this or that version of Oracle, MSSQL, IBM DB2 or others. We let you design some logic for sending information to another system without having to exactly specify how it will be sent – that can be determined later. We have metadata that allows you to set, with simple checkboxes, if your server will use SSL, LDAP, compression, clustering, … When designers are working on screens or reports, we don’t force them down to the level of SQL statements or JSON REST calls. Declare what information you want to share with the end-user and the system will render it appropriately in all common web-browsers and mobile devices – now and in the future.

Designing this way, in a higher-level enterprise-aware language, insulates your investment from the shifting technology landscape and makes developing and maintaining your solution over time easier – I will elaborate on this in a future post and discuss some very exciting platform developments.

Technology like the NexJ Enterprise Application Platform provides a glimpse into the future of enterprise computing – where we will need to know less about our tools because our tools will know more about our needs.

Until next time,

Ed