(2004-05-17) Gillmor Workplace

Steve Gillmor interviews IBM's Ken Bisconti on their Work Place Fat Client/Web Services Browser model. Think of a relatively lightweight MiddleWare stack on the client which consists of a Run-Time environment - a mini-app server (Application Server) if you will - that's based on some services we get from our Web Sphere Everyplace colleagues... It includes a Cloud Scape Data Store, a relational lightweight embedded relational store that we acquired when we bought Informix Software but have developed forward... It includes provisioning technology both from Tivoli as well as from the Eclipse effort, and also bidirectional replication based on SyncML - using Lotus Notes-quality replication methods but based on a more open SyncML method that's also more conducive to synchronization with non-PC (PDA) devices. And then on top of that, we deliver a user experience and a programmability and extensibility model based on top of Eclipse... over the past couple of years, there've also been efforts - one of them called Equinox - to recognize the Eclipse environment as a pretty attractive Run-Time environment as well, not just an environment for building programming tools.