The Fleet of Servoy Products

Hope everybody is aboard....

Ever seen kids dismantling stuff? It is borne out of plain curiosity. So let us get curious and find out what Servoy has to offer to us. Like I said in my previous blog (please refer to the illustration) the first commercial shipment of Servoy product to the US was in the year 2003. After that Servoy has been assiduously increasing its product portfolio to include more and more advanced products that make Servoy a very strong contender in the SaaS as well as PaaS arena.

The illustration below will give an idea about the Servoy Product Suite:

Servoy's Suite of Products
(Illustration by Amrita Satpathy using gliffy.com)

1. Servoy Developer: A powerful IDE (Integrated Development Environment) consisting of a user interface builder, a JavaScript programming editor and a debugging environment. This can be deployed via Servoy Smart Client, Servoy Web Client or Servoy Headless Client all from a single codebase.
   
2. Servoy Server: A lightweight Java Application Server that can be run as a service on Windows or as a daemon on Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Unix, AS400, IBM 390, essentially any platform that will support Java 1.5 or higher.The Servoy server handles database server connections; client concurrency and client-server communication; and intelligent data broadcasting.
   
3. Servoy Smart Client: A small 2 MB 100% Java application that provides the user with a rich environment to interact with the data. 
4. Servoy Web Client: It is the pure html client by Servoy which takes in Servoy forms and business rules and makes them available in any web browser.
   
5. Servoy Headless Client: An application that allows to execute your solution's data and business logic (scripts) via JSP pages, Servelets and Java Applications. 
6. Servoy Runtime: A plugin which contains a built-in, single-user database engine which can be run locally or from a CD to create a stand-alone version of your Servoy solution.

We shall discuss each of the above products in my forthcoming blogs. So all ye crew members buckle up for the long journey ahead. Did I hear an "Aye"???

Ahoy! The journey begins...

Often we have heard the greatest social thinkers speak volumes about questioning the status quo which eventually leads to the path of discovery. Now let me be very clear about this. I am not preaching while writing a blog on a technology called Servoy. But then as an afterthought if we try and understand why there is a deluge of technologies then "questioning the status quo" is something that will pop up first in our minds. And isn't necessity truly the mother of invention?

Similar thoughts were going on in the minds of the co founders of Servoy, Jan Aleman and Jan Blok, who met each other while studying computer science. The idea of Servoy germinated in their technology seasoned minds in the year 1998. The limitations of desktop database tools, the complexities associated with web-based development tools, the steep learning curve and the long development time were the causes of their utter frustration which spurred them to build an enterprise-ready development and deployment environment - based on industry standards - that would enable developers to build solutions many times faster than with Java or .Net. While the first beta version was released in the year 2002, the first commercial bundle of Servoy was shipped to the US in the month of April 2003.

The following pictorial representation shows the gradual evolution of the Servoy suite of products:

As we continue on our (Ser)voyage we will get to know more about Servoy's suite of products, the benefits offered by them, success stories, applications in diverse areas and the way forward for Servoy.

Meanwhile, all ye crew members enjoy the breeze and strike ye oars hard for we need to gain some speed. Did I hear an "Aye Captain"???