Company Blog

Michael Vizard of eWeek published the first formal write-up on Linxter this morning. There’s nothing like working at a tech startup and getting to the point where you are releasing the product. More importantly: this means that our work going forward can be more involved with our developer community.

Recently, the price of text messaging offered by major wireless carriers has been a hot topic in the news. Working for a tech firm – that provides a technology for data exchange – makes me wonder: why is there such a huge markup on SMS? Text messages, after all, are just data.

Linxter is a loosely-coupled, asynchronous messaging platform built on the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). There are three implementation options for the Linxter Internet Service Bus (ISB): Shared, Dedicated and On-Premise.

As the commercial release of Linxter nears, performance details are being requested more frequently, specifically how big messages can be and how fast they can be sent and received.

It is projected that there will be 14 billion IP addressable endpoints by 2010 and 17 billion by 2012. As more things have microchips embedded in them and become IP addressable, they will be able to “talk” for the first time — sending and receiving data over the Internet. This is the Smart Revolution.

This week I’ve been thinking about how to generalize on what Linxter is. Currently we use the term platform-as-a-service to describe our Internet Service Bus. However, as we follow the whole cloud of conversations about these new categories of computing, we begin to question the accuracy of this classification. Leading us to ask the question, what kind of an as-a-Service (aaS) are we?

I have received several inquiries from developers asking about how Linxter is different from Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Microsoft's BizTalk Services offering. The answer really comes down to your needs, resources, and the age old issue of to build or not to build.

As a developer, I understand that good documentation can make or break emerging technologies. As such, in addition to dedicating resources to compile our Getting Started guide, we have also created a series of Quick Starts, allowing developers to rapidly build useful programs.

We feel these task-based samples are a great way to learn the features of new technologies. For Linxter, we have initially developed six, and plan to post them on our site within the week.

The features we are initially focusing on are:

1. Simple Send And Receive

In the next few weeks we will make our SDK for Java available. With its release, Linxter enabled solutions can be developed for multiple platforms, such as the Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

With SDKs for both .NET and Java, Linxter will be available to innovators regardless of their programming language or operating system preferences. Support for diverse development environments will position Linxter to be a catalyst in the coming “Smart Revolution”.

Some time ago I had the thought that in the near future everything would have a microchip embedded in it. I see it as part of the human condition — many times we do things not because we have to, but because we can. Already we embed microchips into many things, and soon virtually everything will have a chip in it. Every niche industry will determine what the benefits would be for doing this. In this Smart Revolution, everything — from shoes, to items in your refrigerator, to light bulbs — would be able to send and receive data.