Keel 2.0 released

NEWS RELEASE

The Keel Group, Ltd.
For immediate release
Contact Information:
Becky Sheetz-Runkle, MarkIT Results 
703.273.0400 (w)/ 703-501-0533 (c)
becky.sheetz@platinumsolutions.com
<mailto:becky.sheetz@platinumsolutions.com> 
 
 

Keel Group Limited Launches Keel 2.0

 
Latest Version of Open Source Application Framework 
Provides Progressive Features and Seamless Installation


 
Reston, VA - (December 17, 2003) - Founders of the open source Keel
framework today released Keel 2.0 to the development community. This new
version is an upgrade from version 1.0 and dramatically improves the
development process for web-based applications. Keel 2.0 is a Java server
side meta-framework or "framework of frameworks" that provides standard
interfaces for a variety of other open source frameworks and components. 
 
Keel is a significant advancement beyond open source frameworks, offering a
service based component architecture. This allows developers to easily plug
the best components from any standards based open source library into their
system and then upgrade to future components without having to rewrite the
code base. Keel 2.0 provides a comprehensive environment for integrating web
applications, speeding development and-perhaps most importantly-establishing
a consistent yet flexible base upon which to build systems.
 
Keel is differentiated by its component design that allows new
implementations to be added and old implementations replaced without
extensive code rewrites. Services see each other as "black boxes" with very
clear boundaries that protect developers from being locked into a specific
implementation environment. Keel evolved much more quickly than most open
source products because it makes use of pre-existing components not
specifically built for Keel.
 
"Release 2.0 brings greater ease of use, enhanced stability, full
distributed processing with clustering and fail-over, unit and functional
tests and an expanded array of services and implementations," said Michael
Nash, lead developer and chief architect of Keel, as well as president and
founder of Bahamian software development firm JGlobal Limited. "Keel is the
ideal tool to bring the power of component-based development without making
a permanent commitment to any one implementation of a component or service.
Keel brings dozens of different tools, projects and frameworks together in a
coherent and immediately productive way. Enhanced support for J2EE/EJB-and
particularly JBoss deployments-makes integrating Keel's power into existing
applications even easier. An extended and more flexibly-built system now
supports hundreds of different deployment combinations," said Nash.
 
"We use Keel as the foundation for our web-based projects. Its flexibility
enables very small teams to quickly develop large, secure, data-intensive
applications. We are excited to see Keel's rapid growth and acceptance
within the development community and proud to be part of the core team that
developed this new version," said Adam Rossi, president of
PlatinumSolutions, a Reston, VA software development firm. 
 
Installation of Keel 2.0 is now vastly simplified. Version 2.0 also includes
an automated build system that will compile the Java code and make
deployment of completed Keel-based applications far easier. 
 
Keel 2.0 also offers improved data persistence. In Keel 1.0 there was one
type of persistence available. In version 2.0 the persistence service has
been decoupled from the core of Keel to give developers more options for
tasks such as organization and storage. This adds a range of options to
Keel's Default Persistence including relational databases, XML, and
Hibernate. As a result, data storage is clearer and more flexible, and
systems can be created much more quickly. 
 
Rearranging business processes is also easy in Keel. Jeff Richley, a
contractor at the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, VA, said, "In the past,
Keel developers have relied on something called 'Sequences' to handle basic
workflow. A major area of improvement in Keel 2.0 is its new workflow
editor, which offers far more flexibility than sequences did. My manager had
me develop an application containing multiple user-interface screens, along
with an associated Keel Model Set for each. She came to me and wanted to
rearrange the entire flow. Using Keel's plugin editor for Eclipse, I made
the changes visually, rebuilt the app with a single click, and in less than
a minute had completely rearranged the application," said Richley.
 
Keel is ideally suited for systems that require the highest security
possible. Keel now utilizes Java Authentication and Authorization Service
(JAAS) as its default security mechanism.  However, Keel 2.0 can also make
use of virtually any security architecture already in place, ensuring that
systems can easily be customized and therefore are more difficult to
successfully attack than COTS systems. 
 
Keel is built on top of the Apache Avalon Project, and with it come three
core concepts:
1.	Each application is made of independent components that are
accessible through standard interfaces. Component Oriented Programming (COP)
provides the flexibility of plugging/unplugging frameworks into the
application. 
2.	Each aspect of a component is separated into as many independent
tasks as possible, while each task is represented separately by a standard
interface. This Separation of Concerns (SOC) allows the user to
perform/control/modify any function of the component without affecting
others.
3.	Each component is externally manageable throughout its lifecycle,
with the help of configuration files. This Inversion of Control (IOC) makes
controlling a component's behavior from the outside possible, easy, and
efficient.
 
To learn more, visit http://www.keelframework.org
<http://www.keelframework.org/> . To request more information on using Keel,
contact the partners listed on http://www.keelframework.org/partners.shtml
<http://www.keelframework.org/partners.shtml> .
 
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