I-Kinetics Inc might get its shot at being a player in the Corba component software market if it can land the venture and strategic investment that it’s currently working on. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company says its ultimate aim is to have PowerJ, Rational Rose and developers using other programming tools write application components directly on top of its DataBroker middleware. Until then, seven year-old I-Kinetics’ software for connecting distributed, object-oriented application components written in Corba IDL or Java ODBC to multiple data stores will remain an embedded, infrastructure play. DataBroker is bundled by object request broker company Iona Technologies Ltd. The company says it will wait to see what Borland International Inc does with its Visigenic Software Inc acquisition’s product and sales strategy before striking any kind of similar arrangement for the VisiBroker ORB which I-Kinetics sees as primarily a Java client tool. The DataBroker currently provides application access to MVS, Oracle and other data stores. It’s got more relational database links coming, plus support for application-specific functionality such as SAP, a batch plug-in for batch processing – the culmination of its long-gestating InfoPump object-wrapping development – a version that can be used as a resource manager in conjunction with Corba object transaction services and a customizable version for developers to create links to their own data types. It has a suite of failover tools coming and has just signed to integrate with the Sonic object-relational data store, and is working on other mapping tools which it says will make it easier for developers to write business objects.
