As the head of development for a software team, you're always anticipating the next big thing: a new feature, a new technology to catapult yourself past the competition. The trick is finding the opportune time to shift gears and make the jump. Since the start of the year, the Cascade development team and I have been busy with our next big thing, Cascade Server 5.0.
We like to put out a major release every year. Last year, 4.0 featured a streamlined User Interface built on top of the Apache Struts web application framework. This year, Cascade 5.0 will be a leaner, meaner web application capable of handling more users and more concurrency.
How we do intend to do it? For one, we're moving away from the JBoss Application Server in favor of the more lightweight, flexible Apache Tomcat servlet container. Secondly, we're embracing the Spring Framework which allows for more modular application development and better JUnit test coverage.
To our users, this translates to greater scalability, performance, and reliability through application load balancing and database clustering. Business users can expect a consistent experience, regardless of the number of users in the system and faster page load and publishing times across the board. At a time when hardware is relatively inexpensive, a clustered application is the answer. The load balanced Cascade will accommodate the needs of your growing organization seamlessly.
In the mean time, we've put our monthly releases on hold to focus on the task at hand. We'll continue to put out patch releases as needed until the release of 5.0.
We are excited by the results thus far and look forward to introducing the next generation of Cascade Server in the near future.