Yesterday,
we got two visitors from France: Jérôme and Thierry from
Noelios Technologies. Noelios is the
company behind restlet.org - a Java
library for ReST-based application development, and the heart of Kauri's request
handling.
We have been contributing to discussions on the restlet mailing list for a while now, some of our patches and bugfixes made it into the restlet source tree, and just last week one of Jeroen's patches was accepted as well. So it was time to meet face-to-face and especially learn more about the commercial entity behind all that ReSTy goodness.
It was great getting to know Jérôme and Thierry, as their ambitions and plans resonated a lot with how we started Outerthought seven years ago. A strong desire for independence, and most importantly a desire to create a setting for accomodating a technological vision: a great motivation to start your own company.
We presented both our companies to each other, discussed the general vision and future plans of both Restlet and Kauri, and even found some opportunities where we could contribute more to Restlet.
For instance, once the Kauri Template Language has sufficiently matured, and also because we've made sure it can be used without the Kauri runtime environment, we'll make sure to provide a KTL adaptor to Restlet, so that people can use KTL stand-alone inside their Restlet application.
'Ecosystem' was the word of the day. Meeting Noelios was a meeting of like-minded businesses, like-minded people behind the business facades, with a passion for software engineering and Doing The Right Thing. I'm hopeful that this meeting is but the start of an on-going conversation, and that this conversation will be mutually beneficial, for both companies, and for the Restlet and Kauri community at large.