Microstate's Hamilton Declares Independence
Microstate Corporation has recently announced that Hamilton, its thin-client
Web application server, is now freely available as Open Source. Hamilton provides
several features that qualify it as an application server, including persistent
database connection management and object caching. Using Hamilton, developers
can build online services without having to reinvent the wheel every time
with respect to security, database performance, and component architecture.
The server models an information space of domains, directories, documents,
entities, users, groups, and databases as Java objects, and stores the structure
and content of applications in a relational database. Hamilton developers
assemble a document from individual component entities, and the server composes
the document on the fly. To develop an application using this system, developers
write custom entity objects, and mix those with the standard entities included
with the application server. Users with varying skills can use different parts
of the system without having to understand matters outside their specialties.
Web designers can create page layouts without understanding Java, programmers
can build components with parameters that the designers can tune, and knowledge
workers maintaining the applications can use a forms-based interface to update
content without having to know HTML.
