Bluestone Software Inc has thrown the weight of its web application server, Sapphire/Web, behind Sun Microsystems Inc’s troubled Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) spec. Bluestone says Sapphire/Web supports virtually all the EJB standards outlined in Spec 1.0, without locking customers into a proprietary implementation. Standards compliance is becoming something of a Bluestone preoccupation, with CORBA, COM, MTS and XML now supported. No surprises there: as a small company competing head- to-head with the likes of Oracle and Netscape, not to mention ambitious peers Allaire, WebLogic and Silverstream, Bluestone must protect its customers’ legacy investments lest the fear of being saddled with unsupported proprietary code drives its prospects away. Even so, EJB is no ordinary standard. Word around the water cooler has it that Sun was unhappy with the Object Management Group and so sought to forge its own industry alliance (CI No 3,378). Diehard skeptics Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard promptly jumped ship. The Redmond giant says it won’t support EJB and HP will do so only in a limited form. Unhappy developers grumble that politics in the Java camp compromised an otherwise promising specification. What was intended as an industry-wide standard seems to have become yet another byproduct of the NOISE coalition – in Redmond-speak, that’s Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun and Everybody Else.
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