Home/Beyond/Title: Elevate: The Essence of Software Delivery

A Revolutionary Approach to Software Packaging

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Introduction

In an era where the pace of technological advancement is unparalleled, the ability to rapidly and efficiently deliver software solutions has never been more crucial. The digital landscape is evolving at an astonishing rate, with the demands of an increasingly connected world necessitating a departure from traditional software delivery methods. This blog post introduces a groundbreaking approach that promises to revolutionize the way devices, applications, and services are developed, delivered, and integrated across the spectrum of computing environments. We are at the cusp of a new dawn in software delivery, one that embraces the complexity of modern requirements while offering an elegant solution to meet these challenges head-on. Join us as we unveil “Elevate” – formerly known as Ditto Maker – and explore its pivotal role in the Essence® Project, setting a new standard for secure, trusted, and dynamic behavior integration in the realms of IoT, IIoT, Edge, Cloud, Mobile, and beyond.

Problem

Software delivery is a major challenge for developers of devices, applications and services, and users alike. Standards organizations, integration tools and services developers, and major funding investments by the software industry have yet to deliver a comprehensive solution that is responsive to the demands of an increasingly connected world that has rapidly changing requirements.

Solution

Imagine a world where every device, application and service can be easily delivered and integrated, with near zero down time. A new approach offers an exciting path for secure and trusted behavior delivery in IoT, IIoT, Edge, Cloud, Mobile, and every other class of computing. That is our vision of software delivery for the Essence Project.

Behavior Integration Essence Style

A Modular Architecture

Essence uses a modular architecture, somewhat like an operating system kernel. This modularity enables dynamic loading of specialized code while allowing the core system to remain small and optimized for general purposes.

Essence is comprised of a code generator, profiler, scheduler, platform bridge, resource balancer, and a formula processor for transforming and translating data and machine behaviors. Essence only needs to be ported to other platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux once and then every Essence app becomes platform agnostic. When combined with drivers (e.g. BSD/Unix drivers or the upcoming effort to produce Essence drivers), apps based on Essence do not need an operating system at all. A pure Essence version will mark a paradigm shifting milestone for computing for many reasons that we will share in future articles and blog posts.

Specialized code used by Essence, such as a device driver or a codec, is provided as an external package which is conceptually similar to a loadable kernel module (LKM). However, the Essence specification provides several benefits over any other LKM implementation. Developers use the Elevate tool to create Aptivs, which are adaptive applications that contain meaning coordinates or code + meaning coordinates.

Elevate

The purpose of Elevate is to provide a method to safely and securely test, compile, encrypt, compress, authenticate, and process (in real-time) packaged content (source code, meaning coordinates, and data). Essence-based Aptivs examine and integrate authorized behaviors at runtime, without needing to shutdown. Every Essence Aptiv makes use of hot-swappable features that are continuously checked for authorized behaviors. This eliminates numerous classes of defects and vulnerabilities (e.g. eliminates the possibility of memory, arithmetic, logic, syntax, parallelism and many other errors that can be exploited by hackers).

Here’s how it works:

  1. PowerAptivs  – The Elevate tool is used to evaluate source code (e.g. drivers, APIs, emulators, browser engines, operating systems, network code, virtual machines, almost any legacy code), data and meaning coordinates for the purpose of generating a media package (e.g. png, jpeg, PDF, mov) as an Essence file.
  2. Unit Testing – The target content is subjected to unit tests and only content that passes units tests get compiled into binaries.
  3. A New Encryption Model – Compiled code, meaning coordinates and data are encrypted with 17 different encryption algorithms and 43 variants in a parallelized obfuscation scheme, which is auto-generated. It’s important to emphasize that no singular algorithm is applied, but all of the designated algorithms are.
  4. Multi-Compression – The resultant binaries are compressed with 14 different lossless compression algorithms.
  5. Authentication – The binaries are code-signed for authentication and regularly checked at runtime.
  6. Behavior Interpretation – Essence will interpret the Aptiv and adopt–authenticated only–behaviors, while still running. No need to shut down for updating purposes, with few exceptions.
  7. Runtime Integration – Each Aptiv has access to other Aptivs (more details in a future post), which makes it possible to integrate the contents of any Aptivs. This is a new and powerful way of aligning behaviors to capabilities of hardware devices, services, operating systems, web browsers, and much more.

Fig. 2 – Elevate Workflow

Elevate Key Benefits List:

  1. Broad Release Day Support – Creators of practically any platform (e.g. hardware, services, network protocols, etc.) who package their platform code and data, immediately gain access to a vast number of features that will work with their platform on the day of product release. This is an entirely new level of interoperability.
  2. Live Updating – With source code supplied via the Essence interface, the application only needs to be built once and can remain running all day long, and new code can be incorporated into the app without the need to rebuild the entire program, and only building in the new changes. When building a traditional application, the process of linking to existing code projects (i.e. libraries) is a long and arduous process that cannot generally be skipped. Depending on the size of the application, the linking phase of compiling a build can take in the tens of minutes, sometimes only to incorporate and test a very minor change. This is a major time sink for developers, as it means there is a delay between implementing a feature or fix and verifying that the new code behaves as expected.
  3. Advanced Encryption and Trusted Behaviors – New apps that bifurcate tested and authenticated (trusted) binaries that exhibit authorized behaviors from corrupted or compromised (e.g. inserted) code that would negatively impact the app or its data. A new look at encryption delivers a higher level of protection. This is a new way to provide continued assess to legitimate software behaviors, even during a period of attack from a wide variety of security attack types.
  4. Real-time Feature Switching – Essence is able to load multiple versions of the same code via the Elevate interface, and can dynamically load/unload specific functionality from each one. Example: Imagine if you could use features/behaviors from two different versions of Microsoft Word, without having to go back and forth between the two applications, all of this is handled in one version of Word that amalgamates the functionality of the different releases. Example: If a new feature is broken, you can load the version of that feature that worked in the previous release in its place and continue to be productive.

We will release the Elevate tool for use by our partners and the global developer community [to be announced].

Follow us on this blog, social media, and our website as we unveil more potentially world-changing solutions.

Note on Brand Name Update – 03/13/24

We want to inform our readers and the global developer community about an important update regarding our brand identity. The tool previously known as “Ditto Maker” has undergone a transformation, and we are excited to introduce its new name: “Elevate.” This change reflects our commitment to lifting the standards of software delivery and integration to new heights.

Elevate continues to embody our vision for a seamless, secure, and efficient approach to behavior delivery across various computing platforms including IoT, IIoT, Edge, Cloud, Mobile, and beyond. With Elevate, developers can create Aptivs—adaptive applications that encapsulate meaning coordinates or a combination of code and meaning coordinates—streamlining the software development process and fostering a new era of interoperability and real-time integration.

This rebranding to Elevate marks a significant milestone in our journey to redefine software delivery and behavior integration. It underscores our dedication to advancing technology and empowering developers to create at the speed of thought.

We are thrilled to embark on this next chapter with Elevate and invite you to join us in exploring the limitless possibilities it brings to the Essence® Project and the broader technological landscape.

Stay tuned for further updates and announcements by following us on this blog, social media, and our website.