Watching how ideas from different fields of study combine and synthesize into something new always fascinates me. The hook-loop fastener technology that we all know by the brand name Velcro came about when George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, noticed how burrs stuck tenaciously to his dog's fur. Today, that particular form of "eureka moment" underlies biomimetics or the study of biomimicry: applying ideas from nature to solve other problems.

Cool Stuff
This cross-pollination of ideas does not just belong to biomimetics. Universities and research institutions have groups dedicated to promoting all sorts of interdisciplinary studies. Likewise, cross-pollination is not restricted to just drawing on nature. The study of complex adaptive systems, also called complexity science, applies to beehives, bird flight, and such, as well as to the stock market, traffic patterns, and virtual communities on the Internet. Wikipedia defines complex adaptive systems as being "complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience."

Hmmm, diverse, multiple interconnected elements with the ability to adapt. Sounds like a description of distributed computing done with purpose. It sounds like our application fabric.

The Fabric Emerges
When we founded Appistry, and designed the fabric, we didn’t set out to make your grandfather’s computer cluster. We set out to orchestrate a bunch of commodity computers to act together to transparently run your applications in a scalable and reliable way and yet present a single, manageable entity to outside observers (developers, administrators, and users).

Early design and implementation work yielded assumptions, principles and design patterns that, unsurprisingly, derived from the synthesis and synergies found in biomimetics and complexity science. You know, things like bees, ants, organizational life cycles, and cellular automata simulations like Conway's Game of Life. By no accident we named our initial architecture the Hive. These principles have never failed us.

Did we actually write our software by observing bees? No, not directly; however, do stop and consider what a beehive teaches us. Individual bees, each important to the hive community, accomplish what needs to be done without central control, and with no single point of failure. Well, there is the queen, but let's not quibble. :-) If a bee dies, another picks up the work, and the hive continues by self-organizing, and self-healing. Why does this work? Stephen Wolfram expressed it best when speaking about his book "A New Kind of Science." He stated that "simple rules can produce fairly complicated behavior. That has some very important implications."

Indeed it does, which brings us to you.

Internet Communities are Complex Adaptive Systems
If anything fits the description of "complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience," it is Internet communities. Each individual is important in Internet communities, and each contributes voluntarily, most often with no central control. In the end, the complex, emergent behavior in successful Internet communities arises from the simple fact that people like you make it happen, learning together, and adapting. From the synthesis and synergies of individuals like you, many complicated and cool things emerge.

A Developer Community Emerges
Today Appistry introduced it's Open Distribution Initiative, and the Peer2Peer Developer Portal. With the Open Distribution Initiative, we place the fabric into your hands so you can experience the power of fabric-enabling your applications. The Appistry EAF Community Edition license allows you to deploy a fabric of 5 workers or 10 cores, in whatever combination. For free, and without expiration date. You can even take your fabric into production if you want.

At the same time, we want you to join us in the Peer2Peer Developer Program. Join the forums, and help us self-organize into a great developer community. There are many folks using the fabric, with even more trying it out. These folks come from a lot of different fields and industries: transportation, GIS, telecommunications, finance, intelligence, and retail among others.

Why should this diversity matter to you? That brings us full circle to the idea of cross-pollination. With such a cross-section of great individuals contributing and working together, synthesizing and synergizing, who knows what great stuff will pop up?

Let’s find out, and it’ll be fun along the way. Download and install the fabric, and we’ll see you in the forums....