Inrupt 1.0 released

This week we announced the generally available release of Inrupt’s Enterprise Solid Server (ESS) version 1.0. You can read more from Tim about what this means for the web, and from John about the new opportunities for businesses.

But I wanted to share more details about the products themselves. Accompanying the Enterprise Server is the release of the Inrupt Developer Tools, as well as the Inrupt PodBrowser. This release marks the beginning of a new phase in which we build on an increasingly mature foundation to enable organizations and their customers to tap into the ecosystem of innovative, human-centered tools and apps, built with Solid.

Mission Critical

The Inrupt suite of products fully conforms to the open standards and specifications of Solid while providing the robustness and security required for the most mission critical applications. The Enterprise Server is engineered to safely manage sensitive or even highly regulated data. It provides advanced authentication, authorization, auditing, and encryption controls to help keep data secure. Additionally, the server provides administration facilities to meet even the most stringent performance and availability SLAs.  

Developer Ecosystem

Inrupt’s Developer Tools make it easy for developers to build exciting new applications that leverage a person's Pod data while also respecting their privacy. All of the developer tools are open source and compatible with any Solid-compliant server. This enables the growing ecosystem and community of developers to contribute and innovate on the Solid platform.

When developers use these tools and libraries to build Solid-enabled applications, they're free to focus on business logic and the value provided by their apps. Less boilerplate means more productivity and innovation.

Solid simplifies software development by removing the need for data ORMs or supporting dozens of APIs. This brings to developers an increase of efficiency and opens the door for applications never before thought possible.

New Relationships

Solid offers a trusted place where people can securely store their data and decide who has access to it. This ensures that data privacy is respected and that only applications and entities that have received consent may access a person's data. People can manage their Pods using the new PodBrowser application: which allows them to manage their Pod's data and how people, entities, and applications interact with it.

This model allows organizations to go directly to users for data, establishing a new type of customer relationship and reducing operational overhead. This new relationship enables organizations to leverage data from various sources that they otherwise would not have access to. This partnership directly with customers allows organizations to provide a plethora of new services and experiences in an ethical and consent driven way.  

A Brave New World

At Inrupt, we’ve spent months refining these products alongside a small group of substantial organizations already leveraging the power of Solid. The Flemish Government is working to provide each of their citizens with a Pod. The UK National Health Service is providing Pods for managing patient data. And organizations such as NatWest and the BBC are exploring applications in finance and entertainment.

This is the promise of Solid. A better web where personal data is managed by the owners of the data and used on their behalf. Data is more accessible and used to provide better experiences and services while facilitating innovation. And all of this is done while keeping data privacy, ownership, and consent as first-order principles.

I cannot wait to see the next chapter of the Web. I expect organizations, developers, and people leveraging Solid to play a huge part in writing it!