History of IFS Foundation1 (2002)

2002

IFS Applications 2002-2 was released 19 April - and with that also Foundation1 2002-2 which includes most of the functionality developed by the Ti22 project during the previous years. This includes the CORBA middleware, BizAPI development framework, new Connect integration framework, and the client access technology.
The Web Kit and IFS Applications web interface had been moved to the J2EE platform and IFS Applications 2002-2 no longer used ASP technology.
The new, easier way to integrate using XML BizAPI interfaces and IFS Connect to publish these as web services was of the main news in IFS Applications 2002-2.

2002 was also the year when the consolidation of application server technologies really started to happen. Out of a sea of quasi-compatible CORBA and Java application servers, came the J2EE 1.3 specification and a set of J2EE application servers that were mature, compatible, and fast enough to be considered for a wider use with business applications. At the same time Microsoft was really beating the drum for .Net and the .Net Framework. It became clear that it was only a matter of time before application servers became commodity. This was confirmed when some vendors started to give their products away for free, and with the availability of high-quality open source J2EE servers.

Realizing that sooner or later it would not be economically sensible to use anything other than standard J2EE also in the middle tier, and having experienced first hand the challenges of working with CORBA, IFS decided to do the change sooner rather than later. The Chhiri project was initiated to phase out CORBA in favor of J2EE. IFS tradition of encapsulating infrastructure in Foundation1 and thus hiding it from the application meant that it was only the Foundation1 frameworks that needed to be changed.

As IFS Applications 2002/3 and the new service based IFS Connect gained momentum, the need for a more productive and better integrated development environment to build services and other Java artifacts became apparent. Consequently the Chhiri project was given the additional directive to produce a highly productive RAD development environment.

Anticipating a rapid increase in the use of mobile devices (PDA:s, mobile phones) in a couple of years time, IFS had early in the year started an effort to extend the architecture, frameworks and tools of Foundation1 to cover volume production of mobile clients (user interfaces) for functionality in IFS Applications. This would be known as project "Handshake". The project set out to solve two key issues facing mobile business applications at the time.

The first was to avoid device lock-in by building a platform that allowed the mobile applications to run on multiple current and future devices.
The second was to create a solution that would work "online when available".

The first task for the project was to survey the market for mobile infrastructure (micro databases and the likes) to use. In the end IBM technologies were chosen - the J9 virtual machine, DB2e database, and MQe message manager. And creation of the frameworks could start.