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On The Edge! -NEW-
Commercial Vendors

The world is going wireless. Nobody knows that better than AnywhereYouGo.com, the largest independent community of wireless application developers. AnywhereYouGo.com is an online community and marketplace that provides resources and tools for wireless developers, including news and reports from the wireless industry, directories of developers and applications, online application testing, tutorials, and discussion groups. AnywhereYouGo.com's users include developers, IT managers, and wireless infrastructure providers from more than 75 countries.

In choosing its infrastructure, AnywhereYouGo.com needed to be confident that the solution it chose would accommodate many updates to its presentation layer each day. As a business, AnywhereYouGo.com needed the security of knowing these revisions would not disrupt the site's availability.

Why Enhydra?
AnywhereYouGo.com turned to Enhydra, a leading Open Source Java™/XML Internet application server, for its solution.

"Our web site is our face to the world so when we began building it, we were determined to build on a solid foundation that was reliable, extensible, and powerful," explained Victor Brilon, technology strategist at AnywhereYouGo.com. "We evaluated a number of technologies, including operating systems and application servers, for AnywhereYouGo.com's infrastructure," continues Brilon. "We discovered Open Source was the best option for AnywhereYouGo.com across the board. We're using Linux and the Enhydra application server, which is the heart of our Open Source Internet platform."

With Enhydra, AnywhereYouGo.com got more than an Internet platform: the company now has a community of support from thousands of developers worldwide, as well as a sophisticated, dynamic application server that will continue to evolve and develop as the demand for wireless applications keeps growing.

Enhydra is the backbone of AnywhereYouGo.com's rapidly growing technology architecture, and it is the foundation of the company's content management system. Not only does the technology possess the broad range of capabilities a busy, highly trafficked site needs, but also, as an Open Source technology, Enhydra shares the open standards principle that is the hallmark of AnywhereYouGo.com.

"Technologically, Enhydra exceeded our expectations for creating a vibrant, robust system to serve our technologically savvy users," says Brilon. "Philosophically, Enhydra shares our commitment to the Open Source movement. It's an excellent match."

The AnywhereYouGo Team (listed below).

With a strong in-house Java team that was focused on building a highly customized production environment, the Open Source nature of Enhydra made the production of AnywhereYouGo's complex site a reality.

"We were able to use Enhydra's built-in functionality, combine it with resources that the Enhydra community contributed, and mix that with our custom development to produce a powerful solution." Says Brilon.

Development Cycle
The company pursued a very aggressive launch plan, developing and deploying in about 90 days. Thanks to unfettered access to Enhydra's source code - as well as the support and resources available through Enhydra's active development community - just a few developers were able to build and deploy the site in that short period of time. Enhydra XMLC helped significantly in this regard as well, allowing site developers to try out various interfaces without requiring additional work on the underlying layer of business logic.

Clearly, flexibility and scalability are critical to the success of AnywhereYouGo.com. Because an Enhydra application is divided into three layers - presentation logic, business logic, and data abstraction - programmers can tend to their respective layers without impacting the other two. Enhydra's unique technology, Enhydra XMLC, which cleanly separates business logic from presentation logic, lets interface designers and Java developers work independently. Enhydra XMLC is a unique compiler that transforms XML documents into a Java class by creating a W3C-standard Document Object Model (DOM). Using Enhydra XMLC, designers are free to make updates and even more significant changes in HTML, WML (Wireless Mark-up Language) or other XML-derived languages, without requiring rework from developers. Similarly, Enhydra XMLC's use of the DOM allows developers to make changes to back-end code without disrupting the presentation layer.

Serving a community of wireless application developers, AnywhereYouGo.com offers daily WML broadcasts to subscribers who request the service. Thanks to Enhydra XMLC, AnywhereYouGo.com can reach wireless subscribers, including those who rely upon handheld devices such as Palm Pilots and WAP-enabled phones, which do not allow for simple integration. Leveraging the value of Open Source Enhydra - Enhydra XMLC in particular - developers were able to adjust the code to deliver content to a multitude of platforms.

Enhydra also allows for the separation of business logic and data logic by way of its Data Object Design Studio (DODS). DODS brings a level of database abstraction to a three-layered Enhydra application, improving efficiency by keeping the database code layer separate from the business logic, allowing greater portability between relational database management systems.

Result
An all-Java solution, Enhydra's standards-based approach means that AnywhereYouGo.com is neither limited by proprietary development tools nor trapped by an artificial solution that cannot accommodate other development tools or systems. Moreover, as an Open Source technology, Enhydra is constantly being reviewed and enhanced by an active, thriving community.

"We have benefited greatly from the Enhydra community, especially from the contribution of WML support into the DOM model (by David Li of DigitalSesame)," says Victor Brilon. In return, AnywhereYouGo has contributed back to the community by creating new build rules to make WML code building easier as well as creating new features in the DODS code.
"We're extremely excited to be working with Enhydra and to be an active part of its community, helping developers via our web site and our contributions to the Enhydra code," he adds

Enhydra has enabled AnywhereYouGo.com to engineer a long-term solution designed to embrace the inevitable, exciting advances yet to come in wireless technologies.

"Enhydra not only helps us achieve our technology goals without trapping us behind a single implementation or vendor, but it also allows us to plan for the future," adds Ryan Fife, also a technology strategist at AnywhereYouGo.com, "And in our industry, the future is never far away."

The AnywhereYouGo Team
(photograph above, from top left, clockwise):

Paul Whitaker, Director of Technology Partnerships
Ken Steck, Embedded Systems Technology Architect
Ryan Fife, Wireless Technology Architect
Victor Brilon, Wireless Technology Architect