featherlite - A Little Bit Of History
It was in the beginning of 2004 when we started to create a framework of re-usable Java components that would allow us to implement industry projects with a focus on planning, scheduling and process control for logistics and manufacturing. This was motivated by the fact, that such products were rare at the time. There already was some industry-proven software which at least promised to suit to our needs. But none of it was lightweight and all of it was way too expensive for our small company.
Luckily, we had all worked for a company before, which had a similar product, but with a focus on planning only. And that product was already 10 years old at that time and - as we felt- not really up to date. We estimated how long it would take us to add control functionality and compared that to the cost of creating a completely new platform. To keep things short, we finally decided to use what we had learned from the former product and its application and combined it with the new ideas that came up at that time (service architecture, dependency injection, and so on) to build a lightweight, easy to use framework of our own.
Looking back, our decision seems to have been right. After just one year of development (starting with three people) we were able to implement our first warehouse management and control project in Switzerland.
Since then we have implemented many more industry projects and have proceeded to stabilize the framework and add new components.
From the outset, we as developers liked the idea of releasing the framework under an open source license. We had all noticed how much our own success depended on open source software (hibernate, log4j, eclipse IDE and RCP, and other 'little helpers') and we felt we should give something back to the community by providing our framework as a 'little helper' for other developers. Yet you may know that shareholders don’t really like the idea of giving away something for free which has been built in house. It took us until mid-2010 to find a compromise acceptable to both sides.
The framework is now available in two parts:
The first part is the core framework with the generic and re-usable components for planning, scheduling and control. This part is now freely available from the featherlite web site, together with tutorials, documentation, source code and some reference implementations for selected applications.
The second part is the commercial one. It covers all re-usable code we identified to be industry-specific. It's commercial, thus you have to pay for, if you use it, yet you might find it to be relatively cheap, compared to the time you'll save by not having to design and implement it on your own.
We expect the framework to be of interest to developers, who are faced with planning, scheduling or control requirements as part of their own application. So check the information from our website or contact us. We will be happy to give any help and support you may require.
(Martin Smock)
