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Incompatibility Frees Innovation
Let the power of virtual machines free applications from the constraints of binary compatibility through network-attached processing
by Shahin Khan

June 8, 2005

All too often, customers request a capability whose implementation requires a change at the chip or system level, and vendors are unable to satisfy the request because the change could break binary compatibility. The vendors have a reason: applications are generally assumed to be written to (and thus have a binary contract with) the OS and the chip they run on.

The technology industry seems obsessed with maintaining binary compatibility, a goal that consumes an inordinate amount of effort and has become a drag on innovation and technology advancement. Makers of chips shoulder an ever-expanding amount of baggage to preserve binary compatibility across generations. Builders of systems take pains to not only ensure binary compatibility across generations, but also provide smooth scalability from small systems to large systems without compromising binary compatibility.

Vendors of operating systems also know better than to even think about breaking binary compatibility. Without it, applications must be recompiled and recertified—a time consuming affair and a huge setback for adoption of any chip-system-OS combination. Without binary compatibility, the current notion of industry-standard chips vaporizes in a picosecond.

With all of that effort, it is telling that customer data centers are almost always built out of several binary incompatible systems. Why? Because data centers evolve and new requirements with pressing deadlines and limited budgets can be met only with systems, in the end, that may not be binary compatible with existing systems. Fast forward a few years and binary compatibility across the data center becomes a quaint fantasy.

There is a simpler way. Applications can and are being built in a fashion that eliminates binary compatibility as a dependency, but the underlying infrastructure has not caught up and put this dependency to rest—until now.

Years ago, developers started a movement toward object-oriented programming and shortly thereafter toward virtual machine-based platforms. Virtual machine-based applications, usually supported by application servers, are the new standard in application development. The majority of new applications are developed in this way, and the trend is growing. According to Gartner, over 50 percent of new enterprise applications are virtual machine-based, and that number is expected to reach 80 percent by 2008. Sun's Java technologies galvanized this trend and led to a host of Java-based middleware from BEA, IBM, JBOSS, Oracle, Sun, and so on. SAP's NetWeaver reinforces this trend and Microsoft .Net solidifies it.

None of these technologies require binary compatibility. Take Java as an example. Most of a typical Java application runs inside a virtual machine and is unaware of the chip, system, or OS that it happens to run on.