Three Thousand Downloads Per Month
FireStorm/DAO is downloaded over 3,000 downloads per month, every month. In fact, downloads peaked at over 11,000 in December 2005, before dropping back to its steady state in the near year. So what does that tell you about FireStorm/DAO?
-FireStorm/DAO is a niche product, but it's a fairly decent sized niche. There's a lot of Java developers out that that are looking for a data persistence solution.
-FireStorm/DAO has been used in just about every possible configuration you could imagine. There is a large automated test suite, but that's no substitute for real world applications. And that means end users working on real applications.
CodeFutures also actively eats its own dogfood. A lot of the internal company systems - from the Web site CMS to the Customer Portal to Licensing System are all developed and updated regularly using FireStorm/DAO. It should be compulsary for application development software vendors to use their own products in real applications, because there's no better way ensure a application development product works.
FireStorm/DAO is probably one of the most widely used commercial Java persistence tools on the market.
We're hoping that the success of FireStorm/DAO can be repeated with FireStorm/SDO - with Service Data Objects instead of Data Access Objects. The different is of course a lot more fundamental than just using the SDO API. FireStorm/SDO is about the future - data services in service-oriented architectures.
PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software