Hi all.
For those that do not read my essays - Witango Technologies remains
profitable and is currently working on version 6 of the Dev Studio,
Server and J2EE Framework which will be released in the future (no
dates set yet).
<ESSAY>
Many years ago when my life was simple and I was in primary school my
School moto was "Truth Above All". It sort of stuck with me over the
years and I try to live to it the best I can. The moto however
regularly comes back to bite me in the ass as many people do not
handle the truth all that well and to some people the truth just
scares the hell out of them. It is always interesting to see how
people react to the cold hard truth but I think it is worth taking
the risk to publicly let you know where we are today. That being
said, I will not be turning this topic into or participating in an
open public forum on Witango Technologies Pty Ltd or Witango
technology and its future features. So do not try to read between
the lines of the email - it simply is what it is, where we are today.
So here is the naked truth ...
Witango Technologies is a niche web middleware provider and as many
of you know is not your typical US tech company operating by burning
venture capital (aka MySQL and PHP) to build a brand that can some
day be floated on a stock market to make it's investors rich or a
multi billion dollar merger like Adobe/Macromedia. Witango
Technologies is an independent software developer run like any
profitable business should be - profitably.
We have watched the .com boom come and because we had good management
and business practices we saw it go, along with many of our
competitors who didn't. I have an article I keep in my desk to
remind me that we are a business foremost which happens to build
software. The 1998 article featured With Imagination (now Witango
Technologies) and 5 other busineses that were amongst the premier Web
Developers in Australia at the time based on clients and the size and
complexity of the systems we built. We were the only private company
not running with venture capital and amazingly we are the only one
still in business.
We believe that stability and longevity is important to a customer
when choosing a service or product regardless of whether it is
software or some other product. Customers like to know that whatever
they choose will be available to them for the long term. Witango
Technologies has been in business for over 13 years and is planning
on being in business for many more years to come. We continues to
power along thanks to the support of all of you and we continue to
grow with a steady stream of sales from both current and new
customers. It was 4 years on June 30 2005 that we purchased T2K with
all its warts, illnesses and cooperatively threaded secrets from
Pervasive (I think we are approaching the time when WT will have
owned the technology as long as Everyware had it) and it has at times
been a bumpy ride but it is calmer waters ahead and smooth sailing
from here.
With 5.0 and 5.5 we added the most commonly requested features,
updated to the latest standards and rewrote all the subsystems,
plumbing and engine that runs Witango. One of our early milestones
was the eradication of Server Watcher (T2K's perceived stability)
which we have aspired to replace with actual server stability. I am
not saying the server is perfect, but as those that send us their
stack traces can verify, we prioritise fixing crashes above all other
bugs, stability is priority #1. A few of the subsystems that have
been rewritten and replaced are the datasource pooling, ODBC
interface, caching, SQL generator, XML parser, XML tags, tag
processor, encoding subsystems, etc. In the server we have also
removed all dependancies on external libraries that are not open
source and we now have a single common code base across all
platforms. All this has been in preparation for version 6 which we
are currently working on and will be released in the future at the
next Dev Conference (no dates set yet so please do not ask). We now
have a solid foundation for the server to build upon.
The new Server 6 and J2EE Framework 6 will have many new features
including a lot more actions and it will be based on unicode instead
of assuming Latin-1 is the charset of the OS it runs on. The new
server will have new actions for Web Services, Reading Mail,
Directory Manipulation, LDAP and TCFs have been enhanced to allow
multiple classes per TCF as well as private TCFs that expose only the
method interface and not the logic within them. The builder actions
have also been merged and enhanced. It is not too late to ask for
features so if you have an idea for a new action or tag let us know -
log into the developer site, go to the Utilities and log a new feature.
We are nearing the completion of a total rewrite of the Dev Studios
for version 6 and has many new interface enhancements. We have
rewritten Dev Studio 6 in Java using JRE 5.0 so we can have a common
code base for all platforms. I hear screams from the .Net/CLI Neo-
Luddites but Java, now that Sun and MS have kissed and made up,
allows us to have the Dev Studio running on OS X, Windows, Linux and
Solaris without the risks or limitations that came with the Mono
Project or other 3rd Party libraries or tools. Any OS that has a JRE
5.0 will be able to run the Dev Studio.
The Dev Studios up to 5.5 has dependencies on libraries and
frameworks dating back to 1997 and on OS X they are even older so the
current Dev Studio code has been retired and we are fast tracking the
development of DS 6 to overcome some issues in the 5.x code that we
cannot work around. It is no longer possible to support the current
Dev Studios (OS X and Windows) with the current code base as the 3rd
Party libraries that they depended on are no longer supported and as
operating systems have been upgraded they have become less stable and
unfixable.
Finally and because you asked, other projects I have been involved in
recently include KidTechnic.com (the next generation of engineers)
and the soon to be launched motorcycleparking.com.au. There are a
few others but they are still in the secret/concept stage.
</ESSAY>
I hope this answers your questions.
Regards
Phil
________________________________________________________________________
TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf
