Borland International Inc says there’s no mystery over the Entera middleware product been so quiet about recently (CI No 3,300). A new version is to be launched in January. Borland says that Entera 4 is currently in beta and existing customers will be very excited about the new product. There has been growing speculation about Entera as Borland has been tight-lipped about its future as a standalone product. But the company now says that Entera 4 will have many new features, with the biggest change being the end of its proprietary remote procedure call in favor of the standard DCE-based call. In addition, it says that Entera 4 will support asynchronous calls, threading and context handle data types to support persistent services. Database support is to be enhanced to support threaded communication and sophisticated access to stored procedures. The application management component has been completely overhauled and is Java-based, and will support RPC and DCOM protocols. Entera was the main reason why Borland bought Open Environment Corp for $65m back in May 1996, and while the product has been incorporated into its Delphi Enterprise Pascal-based software development tool, there have been fears for its future development as a standalone product.
