Forte to Java Help

Question

Hello All,
I am new to this forum and new to Forte (working with it for about a year). I wanted to know the benefits of moving from Forte to Java. I am suppose to list all the benefits- pros & cons. I am reading on the subject but any help or advice from your end will also help.
thanks.

Answer 1

As one of the engineers supporting Fort� and IS EAI, I would like to add to the solid comments from "fortever" -- which I basically agree with. These are my personal comments, and do not represent any offical position by Sun. (I also really love the product, and worked for Fort� before the acquisition in 1999.)
The fact is, computer science students and professional software developers have been focusing on Java for much more than a decade, and the pool of trained talent is thousands of times greater for Java, and growing. Fort� is written in C++, and as a computer science student, I welcome and honor the migration to languages that have a garbage-collected runtime, like Java, TOOL, and Objective-C. As stable as Fort� is, Java is refining and progressing the state of the art.
I also believe that the open source model for Java is a good thing, long term. Yes, products that are tightly integrated, like Fort�, are wonderful. But I've been a software engineer for nearly 30 years, and I've lost count of the number of proprietary, tightly-integrated products that have fallen by the wayside. (I've been a part of companies that have wasted tens of millions of dollars on proprietary technology, and struggled to keep them alive for decades.) We are in the middle of a paradigm shift for large IT organizations. Once upon a time, you could not go wrong by recommending IBM and their proprietary technologies. Now, we have studies by the European Economic Community and governments in South America and Asia that are recommending open source products as a long-term, strategic solution -- BECAUSE they won't fall by the wayside in the same way.
New service-oriented architecture technologies are being support in the Java world, but not in Fort�. For example, our Java CAPS development environment makes it easy to build very sophisticated applications and integration solutions using the latest WSDL, BPEL, etc. standards. Support for these standards are very basic and rather out-of-date in Fort� UDS and IS EAI, and unlikely to improve as the product moves towards end of life.
Quite honestly, I don't believe you or your organization have a choice about moving from Fort�. As flawed as Java is, it's getting better and better, and it's the only non-proprietary solution I know of that supports industrial sized, scalable, distributed, manageable, heterogeneous applications on all kinds of hardware.