<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<document url="http://castor.codehaus.org/professional-services.xml">
  <properties>
    <title>Castor -- Professional services</title>
    <abstract>
       Useful information about commercial support for Castor.</abstract>
    <status>Final</status>
  </properties>
  <body>
    <title>Castor -- Professional services</title>
    <header>
    </header>

    <section title="Introduction">

      <p>
        As already explained, Castor is an open-source product. This means that the
        source code is available at no charge and may be obtained using
        <a href="scm.xml">SVN</a> or <a href="download.xml">downloaded</a>
        via <url>http://dist.codehaus.org/castor</url>. Due to the
        <i>open source</i> nature of the project, there is no guaranteed level of
        support (<b>of commercial quality</b>) offered by the project and its
        community.
      </p>

      <p>
        Still, there are a growing number of third party individuals/companies
        providing such support in the form of <b>professional services</b>.
        This page provides you with a directory of individuals/companies
        offering commercial services related to individual or all areas
        of Castor.
      </p>

      <p>
        We hope that the information provided is of value to you, our users,
        and the individuals/companies displayed below will be more than happy
        to discuss any suggestions/recommendations related to this offerings.
      </p>

    </section>

    <section title="Individuals/Companies and their commercial offerings">

      <companies>

        <company id="Indoqa">
          <name>Indoqa</name>
          <url>http://www.indoqa.com/en/services/opensource-technology</url>
          <contact>
            <name>Werner Guttmann</name>
            <email><a href="mailto:werner DOT guttmann @ indoqa DOT com">Werner Guttmann</a></email>
            <phone>on request</phone>
            <skype>on request</skype>
            <description>Technical architect, Castor JDO committer</description>
          </contact>
          <description>
            <b>Indoqa</b> offers expertise in the area of J2EE applications, with a strong 
            emphasis on the integration of the following (essential) framework areas:
            
            <ul>
                <li>object/relational mapping tools</li>
                <li>XML data binding frameworks</li>
                <li>Spring</li>
            </ul>
            
            in general and Castor JDO and XML in particular. Above that, we aspire to 
            support clients in their focus to integrate such frameworks into their 
            enterprise computing platforms<br/>
            <br/>
            In the person of <b>Werner Guttmann</b>, Indoqa provides a long-time committer 
            and the current project lead of Castor, who has been responsible for:

            <ul>
              <li>Improving and maintaining both Castor JDO and XML</li>
              <li>Enhancing the Castor XML code generator</li>
              <li>Providing JPA 3.0 compliance</li>
              <li>Providing JAXB 2.1 compliance</li>
              <li>Castor JDO offering for Spring ORM</li>
              <li>Castor XML offering for Spring</li>
            </ul>
            
            <br/>
            In the person of <b>Matthias Epheser</b>, Indoqa provides a long-time contributor
            in code areas related to code generation.
            
          </description>
        </company>

        <company id="codo">
          <name>CODA: Financial Intelligence</name>
          <url>http://www.coda.com/</url>
          <contact>
            <name>Andrew Fawcett</name>
            <email>andrew.fawcett@coda.com</email>
            <phone></phone>
            <description>Technical Architect
            </description>
          </contact>
          <description>
            "As a developer of international financial management and
            procurement systems, CODA started a project to XML-enable our Financials
            application server," noted Andrew Fawcett of CODA. "We made two major
            technology decisions. The first was to use the W3C XML Schema to
            describe our XML messages. The second was to facilitate the use of an
            XML Data Binding framework. This allows our developers to process XML
            messages in a more productive and intuitive way within their programs,
            without requiring extensive training and experience with XML or its
            traditional APIs such as SAX or DOM. In performing an analysis of XML
            Data Binding frameworks, we found that Castor was the only
            implementation at the time that met our needs in terms of its support
            for W3C XML Schema and its ability to integrate with our Web
            infrastructure."
            <br/>
            "In addition," Fawcett continued, "we use Castor internally within our
            Web client-enabling framework (based on the Java Servlet API). Java
            source code produced by the Castor source code generator is used to
            dynamically bind data to our Web forms. The resulting data can then be
            marshaled directly between our Web applications and application server."
          </description>
        </company>

        <company id="syscon">
          <name>Syscon Ingenieurbüro für Meß- und Datentechnik GmbH</name>
          <url>http://www.syscon.eu/</url>
          <contact>
            <name>Ralf Joachim</name>
            <email>ralf.joachim@syscon.eu</email>
            <phone>+49 7071 369075</phone>
            <description>CEO, Technical architect</description>
          </contact>
          <description>
            Syscon is primarily concerned with the developement of custom-build/purpose-build
            software solutions and the design of database systems since its foundation in 1996.
            For 4 years we have been developing Java applications in enterprise environment.
            For these applications, we frequently use our own client/server framework side by
            side with open source projects such as the data binding framework Castor, where
            one of our engineers is an active committer.
          </description>
        </company>

      </companies>

    </section>

  </body>
</document>
