News

OpenLogic designs BlueGlue to hold open-source infrastructure together

• By Rich Seeley
• September 7, 2004

As Java coders make greater use of open-source tools, they need a way to organize and coordinate software downloads from the groups that make up the open-source community, argues Andy Grolnick, VP marketing at OpenLogic.

To simplify the task, OpenLogic has introduced what he describes as a new category of organizational products for developers working in Java or LAMP (the acronym for the combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and either Perl, Python, or PHP).

This summer, OpenLogic has been going to gatherings such as JavaOne and the Open Source Conference to introduce its BlueGlue product, which was formerly known as Out-of-the-Box.

As Grolnick explains it, BlueGlue is a point-and-click tool for selecting, installing, configuring and maintaining open-source tools in a development infrastructure. This saves developers and the organizations time and the cost of figuring out which open-source tools to use in a given project, he says.

Eric Weidner, OpenLogic's lead developer for BlueGlue, explains how it might work for a Java developer doing a three-tier application: 'He'll need an application server so we'll provide JBoss,' Weidner says. 'He'll need JBoss tied into a database, so we'll provide MySQL. He may need objects tied into a relational mapping tool, so we'll provide Hibernate.'

BlueGlue includes sample applications to help developers understand how to use open-source tools they might not be familiar with, such as Hibernate, the object/relational persistence and query service for Java, Weidner says.

'We provide the whole infrastructure that he would work on top of to build his application,' he says. 'So that he doesn't have to spend two or three weeks trying to get his environment stable and useful, so that he can actually start on the real work, which is building the business logic and the value-add for his business problem.'

Grolnick points out BlueGlue also allows a developer to change from one open-source tool to another, for example, from the popular MySQL to PostgreSQL, the sophisticated database tool originally developed at UC Berkeley and now under the umbrella of the Global Development Group. BlueGlue provides a utility for changing from MySQL to PostgreSQL without having to go in manually and change all the configuration files, he says.

BlueGlue helps developers select software from more than 100 open-source projects including Apache, JBoss, Tomcat, Struts, Eclipse, PHP, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CVS, Hibernate, AspectJ and Wiki.

Annual license fees start at $199, a price the company hopes will appeal to budget-conscious open-source coders.

More information about OpenLogic and BlueGlue is available at www.openlogic.com .