2009 was a great year for ObjectSource. It saw the inception of the company in India, followed by string of successful project executions. Although I had confined myself to architecture and design of large scalable transactional systems for some of the largest banks and financial institutions in US for the last decade, I was a curious person and had picked up multiple related technologies along the way. 2009 became the watershed year for perfecting all those additional technologies and also delivered wonderful solutions to our clients. Let me just sum up the areas that we worked as we delivered these projects in 2009.

So, here goes the technology list:

  1. Eclipse Rich Client Platform – SWT, JFace, EMF, Teneo and EclipseLink – This was a first time building a large product for a client using Eclipse RCP
  2. PHP based SMB web application development – including PEAR and Zend (I had used PHP all along, but never used it extensively to build large systems)
  3. JavaEE – EJB 3.1, JPA, JMS, Spring, Seam, Hibernate, JBoss, Glassfish, WebLogic – the usual tools that we have always used. There was of course no learning involved here – Just deliver !
  4. WebLogic Portal – Completed a WebLogic Portal effort that began in 2008
  5. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – Wow this was a big one. We began 2009 without knowing much about GWT and today, I know enough to write a book on GWT architectures and eco system (Perhaps I might !). We have been enamored so much by the productivity, elegance  and simplicity of solutions built with this framework that GWT is now a central and strategic piece in the solutions that we propose to our customers.
  6. JBpm 3.x. We built some massive systems using JBpm with GWT for local government agencies in India
  7. REST – Once you go REST you never look WEST… Excellent technology, simpler and more productive than SOAP. REST with JSON and Xml both are excellent. Combine that with GWT and you have a killer Web 2.0 Rich Internet Application.
  8. .NET – Oh Yeah! This a absolute first for me. Having got used to the variety of choices in the Java world, I am not a big fan of one way of doing things in .NET. But sometimes it gets the job done well. We would have been more productive with JEE and related technologies (primarily because our expertise lies in that area), but when building web based applications for SMBs in India, where keeping the cost low is a big criteria, we are constrained by the availability of technologies supported by Hosting providers. And a majority of hosting providers in India provide really inexpensive hosting for Microsoft stack. So, using this technology is really a pragmatic choice for us. The choice that I made by brains not by heart :-) . We used key pieces of .NET 3.5 such as LINQ, REST/JSON with WCF and hooked it up to a GWT front end.
  9. JavaFX – Oh boy – We never ever wished to get our hands dirty with this technology until it stabilized a bit. But the client demanded it and we have been delivered on it. I am personally working on this project to deliver from our end.
  10. Sun Identity Manager – These projects just keep coming and they pay well for short burst of work, but not a strategic piece of equation for us going forward, especially since Oracle has decided to sunset this product.

I know 2010 is going to be a big year for us, mostly in terms of stabilizing the portfolios we picked up in 2009 and reaching out to new frontiers. By the way, this post should have been put by Dec 31 2009, but I was perhaps busy working on the JavaFX project that day !

My plans for  ObjectSource in 2010 are as follows:

  1. Get some long term projects mostly in Java EE arena
  2. Prepare long term plans for .NET product portfolios
  3. Roll out a role mining product, partner with systems integrators for US market

On personal front, I have the following plans:

  1. Get some break from work, relax a little bit and get back in shape to hike Grand Canyon (up and down in a day) for the third time !! Believe me – that’s fun when planned well in the right season
  2. Write a book on GWT and another on Security/Access Management in a SOA world
  3. Blog more. Share more thoughts with our readers.
  4. Read more tech blogs from wonderful folks out there and gain more insights.