One of the most unique aspects of AppLogic is its ability to package full distributed systems into executable entities. When we designed AppLogic, the purpose of packaging the application was to ensure the complete separation of hardware and software operational responsibilities. This was critical to enabling true utility computing. We succeeded in the effort.

Users, however, found another use for the packages - documenting the applications themselves. AppLogic’s graphical depiction of application structure makes it easy to see at a glance what components exist, what the communication linkages are, what volumes exist and which contain user data. This was a use case we hadn’t foreseen.

In the 2.3 release of AppLogic, due to go into beta around the end of March, we’ll be adding enhanced annotation capabilities to AppLogic to provide for creating more complete application documentation. You’ll be able to add text and graphical annotation elements to application diagrams plus be able to create text notes for appliances. Combined with the ability to operate directly upon the application and to embed operational policies into applications with dynamic appliances, adding annotation essentially turns the application into its own run book.

As a teaser, below is a screen capture from the QA grid being used to test the 2.3 release, in which you can see a bit of the annotation in the infrastructure editor.

(click on image to enlarge)