On June 13th, I presented ActiveMatrix to a large group of interested people in Chicago. Many of the folks attending were not existing TIBCO customers and were not familiar with ActiveMatrix. As a result, the agenda was a little different and  focused on explaining the need for a service container in service development.

The notion of a container that allows developers to focus on writing business logic and not building out communications and plumbing code was something that really hit home with the attendees. It is well accepted that web application frameworks provide real value in reducing the amount of code developers need to write when building a web application. A service container — like ActiveMatrix Service Grid — takes that idea one step further and removes the need to write code that is common to all services and service based applications. Further, ActiveMatrix is not specific to Java, but but provides users with these benefits across multiple development languages.

Perhaps the single biggest chunk of functionality needed for building services and service based applications is communications functionality. A service needs to be wrapped in communications code so it can be invoked, and that service needs to be able to invoke other services in order to operate. A service container must make all of this as easy for the developer as possible.

ActiveMatrix Service Grid goes beyond simply providing a SOAP stack and abstracts away all of the communications-related plumbing. A service deployed on the Grid can invoke another service via a single line of code without knowing what the transport or communications protocol required will be. Grid-based services can be moved without any code or configuration changes to either the services themselves, or the services that reuse them.

The folks in Chicago were very excitied and many requested follow-up meetings to see TIBCO’s revolutionary service container in action.