 money.
The most interesting aspect of Boomi's solution may simply be that it leverages Jini dynamic networking technology to provide enterprise quality service from an all-Java system in an environment where J2EE is not an option. Most people in similar situations would either turn to J2EE to help them achieve scale, failover, and load balancing for an enterprise Java system, or try to obtain those system properties from operating system-specific tools. Many of those solutions are presently too costly, or too complex for smaller and medium size firms.
By exploiting the parallelism inherent in the system integration process, Boomi was able to offer a high-availability and scalable solution entirely within its own software offering. Its customers can use their existing servers, and do not have to be experts in cluster setup and maintenance. As a system's load increases, customers can scale the system up simply by introducing additional cluster nodes. While software is still the bottleneck in harnessing the collective power of commodity, off-the-shelf hardware, Boomi's system demonstrates that rethinking a problem from the vantage point of parallelism and scalability can yield surprisingly effective solutions.
We would like to thank Rick Nucci and Mitch Stewart at Boomi Software, for providing a description of their Jini-based system integration architecture, and to Sun Microsystems, Inc., for
Jini Community Web site
Myricom's Myrinet interface
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Frank Sommers is an editor with Artima Developer. He is also founder and president of Autospaces, Inc., a company providing collaboration and workflow tools in the financial services industry.
Artima provides consulting and training services to help you make the most of Scala, reactive and functional programming, enterprise systems, big data, and testing.