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It should be possible to develop, debug, and edit services over
the Internet, using PC-based graphical tools, in collaboration with
other remotely located or mobile developers.
We have seen situations like this before. Before development of
spreadsheets, accountants performed spreadsheet computations by
asking MIS to write a COBOL program. With the advent of PC-based
spreadsheets, professionals could perform such computations
themselves far more effectively and could share them with
coworkers. Desktop publishing, presentation graphics, and visual
application development tools such as PowerBuilder had similar
effects. We believe that modern graphical tools will do the same
for the construction of Web-based online information services.
Vermeer Technologies and its
Mission
Vermeer Technologies Inc. is a venture-capital funded
independent software firm founded in 1994 by Charles Ferguson and
Randy Forgaard. Vermeer Technologies intends to become an industry
leader in Internet software by contributing to the construction of
an open, standards-based information infrastructure available to
everyone. In particular, we plan to make it easy for anyone to
develop a Web-based information service, either for internal use
within their organization or for publication on the Internet.
Accordingly, Vermeer is developing open, standards-based,
client-server visual tools for collaborative World Wide Web service
development. These visual tools will enable end-users and
professionals (collaborating across the Internet) to inexpensively
develop and operate powerful World Wide Web information services,
without the need for programming. (These services currently require
complex custom programming.) Nonprogrammers will be able to develop
services for the first time, and professional developers will gain
highly leveraged productivity tools. Our architecture also supports
many usage models ranging from individual self-publishing to
collaborative remote authoring for large commercial Web hosting
services. Our architecture is platform independent and will be
available on all major client and server computer platforms, on all
operating systems, and for all standard-conforming commercial Web
servers. Our vendor-independent, open APIs will enable us to
construct partnerships with other industry leaders in complementary
areas such as text indexing, electronic payment systems,
high-performance Web servers, and other functionalities to be
developed in the future.
Vermeer intends to rigorously support IETF and W3C standards and
is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium. Vermeer's
architecture relies on and supports all current standards and is
designed to accommodate future standards as they are finalized.
Vermeer is an entirely independent firm and has no entrenched
interests derived from existing or proprietary products or
businesses. Vermeer is therefore completely free to focus on the
construction of the most open, easy to use, interoperable products
possible.
