Where Did Power Servlets Come From?
Bruce Cichowlas, the inventor of the Power Servlet, is no stranger to technology innovation. After graduating from MIT at 19, Bruce joined the original Lotus Notes development team and from there went on to invent the sophisticated technologies behind the Kurzweil piano keyboard. “Power Servlets came to me two years ago when I tried to design a Java-based music Web site for my teenagers to build,” said Cichowlas, Espressiv cofounder and vice president of R&D. “The complexity I encountered drove me to come up with a simpler approach so that my kids could build it themselves.” The result was the Power Servlet, an entirely new middleware for Web applications. “J2EE is an incredibly open, robust, and scalable platform. But it is also incredibly complex from an application developer’s perspective,” said Bill Hughes, another Espressiv cofounder and vice president of product development. “The reason is simple: the Web was never designed for building and maintaining enterprise applications. Wh
