Cirquet is an infrastructure platform and a set
of tools for the development, deployment and management of distributed applications composed of JavaBeans™ and Web services.
Developers can rapidly assemble distributed applications from JavaBeans
and Web services either programmatically or through visual assembly tools and wizards.
Components and services in the Cirquet Network are totally location
independent. The Cirquet Runtime transparently performs all discovery, binding and communication with remote objects. Within
the Cirquet development environment, the programmer does not need to define component location or linking – these properties
are dynamically configurable by an application assembler or administrator without coding.
Cirquet application components can be dynamically deployed to any
device on the network that has a J2SE JVM. Cirquet components can be dynamically configured to run locally or remotely, and
can be dynamically load-balanced across an arbitrary group of machines.
Within the Cirquet Network, any updates to the properties or code
of any deployed component can be dynamically propagated around the network without application or user disruption.
All JavaBeans within the Cirquet environment are made available as
Web services. Cirquet generates the WSDL file for each component on demand and the built-in SOAP dispatcher routes the incoming
SOAP request to the referenced component. Using the Cirquet SDK, developers can use Web services as if they were JavaBeans,
without needing any knowledge of WSDL or SOAP.
All Cirquet component and application definitions are stored in the
Cirquet Directory. Distributed applications can be centrally managed using the Cirquet Management Console.
The Cirquet environment is 100% pure Java and can run anywhere that
a JVM is present. The Cirquet Runtime exists as a service or daemon on any machine that Cirquet components are to be deployed.
The underlying network technology uses the JXTA protocols, which support dynamic discovery, peer-to-peer communication, peer
group operations and communication across firewalls, NAT and proxy servers.
Athomas served as chief software architect for Cirquet and developed
the core API's on which all of Cirquet's tools and services were built.
