Now that you have an understanding of what on demand means to you as a developer, you are better equipped to use the available tools to move your company to the next step. If you've read the Sample IT projects on the previous tab, then you know that becoming an On Demand Business is really just business as usual, but with a long-term focus. While concepts like grid computing are just emerging and will continue to coalesce with time, the backbone of on demand is developing using open standards-based technologies to build fast, flexible, modular applications: things you've been doing for years, but with a renewed and fresh perspective. Keeping this in mind, we'll review some essential ingredients to creating an on demand development environment.
The following is a collection of tools and downloads that can get you started with creating an On Demand Operating Environment. As mentioned earlier, three essential components make up the on demand development environment: integration, virtualization, and automation.
Building an integrated business -- linking people, processes, applications, systems, and data -- begins with the technologies you employ in your development environment. Starting with open standards-based technologies like the Java platform, Web services, XML, and Linux allows you to focus on the applications, not the products on which they will be implemented. Tools built upon open standards form the foundation of any On Demand Business. Here are some select resources for you to explore futher:
The Eclipse platform is a popular open source framework that allows you to discover, integrate, and run modules.
The IBM Software Delivery Platform is a comprehensive set of tools, coupled with proven best practices and professional services. It provides tools that individuals and teams need to successfully build, integrate, extend, modernize, and deploy software and software-based systems.
Read about integration patterns, which are complex e-business applications that can be built by combining multiple business patterns together using integration patterns as the "glue."
Virtualized businesses are able to manage their distributed resources as if they were a single, large, virtual computer. Harnessing all that computing power is a daunting task, but many tools are available to help you get started:
Preview the IBM Virtualization Engine, a suite of systems services and technologies that can help your business improve the effectiveness of IT as it treats resources of individual servers, storage, and networking products to function as a single pool or entity, allowing access and management of resources across an organization more efficiently.
Directory Replicator for Grid is a pre-release performance directory transfer tool from alphaWorks that efficiently uses the GridFTP protocol to move directory structures between nodes on the grid.
See the Grid computing downloads area for a comprehensive listing of tools for building virtualized systems.
Automating your business means developing an infrastructure that is self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, and self-optimizing. Sounds impossible? It's not. And many tools can help you get started.
Whether you're looking to automate the installation process or manage all systems using a browser-based, common user interface, you'll want to start with the Autonomic Toolkit.
Monitoring the performance of transactions across a distributed environment is critical to an On Demand Business. Business Workload Manager (BWLM) Prototype, a pre-release technology from alphaWorks, helps with this task by monitoring and adjusting the allocation of computing resources on an ongoing, split-second basis.
Portals are hot now, but configuing a secure portal solution can be a time-consuming task. The Configuration Utility for a Secure Portal, a pre-release technology from alphaWorks, automates the steps required for configuring WebSphere Portal 5 and Tivoli Access Manager 4.1 into a secure portal on Windows, significantly reducing the time required for this task.
See the Autonomic computing downloads area for a comprehensive listing of tools for building automated systems.
