Rise of the superplatform: Overkill or just right?

PenguinCandidate writes “Long gone are the days when an application platform was a relatively small environment that consisted of just a complier, an operating system and a few rudimentary frameworks.

Due to a combination of user demand and a competitive market among the likes of mega vendors like IBM, Oracle and SAP, the application platform — specifically those written in Java — has grown into a platform built on multiple features and is becoming increasingly popular among certain groups of users.

Within the last three years, the middleware industry has seen the rise of a new market segment of highly available, manageable and secure platforms that have superseded their distant cousins to comprise a completely new category of functionality beyond what Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) could provide: the Java superplatform.”