uniPaaS - It's a Kind of Magic

I've used Magic Software's development tools all of my professional, working life. It's been time and energy that has always paid-off in the simple business of delivering software that works. So when I heard Magic had something new coming up, I was keen to get the true dirt. Let's see if I can spill some beans here.

uniPaaS - It's not your Father's Magic

The big splashes and ripples in the pool of the software industry turn out often to be simple and innovative ideas wrapped in unnecessarily complex language and buzzwords. To get to the cut and thrust of the vision for uniPaaS you'll have to wade through a lot of acronyms and BS. But the ripples of this one are good, the ripples are good, especially for Magicians (what Magic developers call themselves).

As the rumour-mill swung into action on the Magic Developer's Mailing List regarding G5, rich-client and uniPaas, Sherm Levine came up with the image of Product Marketing throwing a box full of word-magnets at the refrigerator door to see what stuck. The truth never hurts.

So chances are you know Magic. You know how great it's been at abstracting technological complexity and just let the developer focus on implementing business logic in a unique table-driven development environment with greatly reduced coding and time to market. It's a tool that makes it easy to appear smart and get things done.

Shortcut to Greatness

As the technological waves swept over developer communities these past 20 years, Magic has always proven the shortcut to greatness by remaining true to its table-driven metaphor providing the means to create and migrate apps from early DOS days,to UNIX, to Windows, to Client-Server architectures and any database you can name, followed recently by web and browser-based deployment methods. Well, you know the story, we've been on a long road. No pause for breath it's about to turn into a thrill-ride.

uniPaaS is the next evolution of the eDeveloper tool, and now aims to round-out its offering by delivering RIA (rich internet applications) and adopting a SaaS model, what Magic terms a SaaS-enabled application platform (SEAP).

As ever, wikipedia has worthy reference materials:

SaaS - Software as a service

PaaS - Platform as a service

Magic has an exceptionally strong pitch to make here. If PaaS is the provision of the platform an organization needs for development, test, deployment, data storage, integration and so forth, available on-line and supporting multi-tenancy, scalable and robust applications, then eDeveloper + iBolt + Rich Client + Partitioning/M&M server is the complete, unified paradigm.

Magic's Rich Client technology has been under development for some time, undergone extensive beta-test particularly with clients such as Fujitsu in Japan and will finally see release this month.

This places Magic into the arena with more mainstream RIA technologies such as Flex or Silverlight, but where Magic really scores is that it provides the entire technology stack, Flex and Silverlight meanwhile although creating incredibly rich, expressive and immersive application experiences that Magic can't quite match yet, do need other complex development tools to deliver a complete application solution.

I'll provide a hands-on write-up and some demos in another post on Rich Client but basically what you have in this v1.0 release of uniPaaS is Magic/eDeveloper as we know it with the addition of a Rich Client form type which is right now based on Java technology. (A Magic developer does nothing different simply the application is deployed over the internet using java swt)

So Magic's release schedule appears to be something like this:

Now - uniPaaS v1.0 - development of RC apps with java-based deployment

September 2008 - v1.5 - development and deployment of RC based on .net

February 2009 - v2.0 - everything that's been promised with the uniPaaS roadmap - including .net based clients that can embed .net form controls, access .net assemblies, deploy on windows mobile clients, fuller saas support including a new tenancy monitoring and management server, failover and enhancements in the area of web-services, ajax plumbing for html-merge, and a round of UI, IDE and productivity changes.

I expect you'll be reading a lot more about uniPaaS in the coming months. First up, Bloor have written a simple overview of Magic and uniPaaS here:

Bloor's Magic Story

Stay tuned.