Phil, I for one appreciate your response. It is great to hear from you periodically to give us an update of the direction With is pursuing.
I am not a very good poker player as honesty is first and foremost with me as well. I have used R:Base (Oterro) as my DB from the get go and when I started using Witango 5.0, I started to have doubts considering the problems I was having. I am happy to report that I am using Witango 5.5 and Oterro 3.5 Beta and all is well. Very stable. I am getting to be an older fart and am not real interested in the learning curves involved with proceeding to alternate products. Looking forward to enhanced Witango Dev and Server products. Steve Fogelson Internet Commerce Solutions -----Original Message----- From: Phil Wade [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 11:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Witango-Talk: State of the Union address 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 ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf
