In a bid to simplify Windows NT application development, Borland International Inc has come up with middleware technology designed to be used by corporates with their own software development teams. Application servers built with MIDAS, Multi-Tier Distributed Application Services Suite, are said to make the application development process easier and more manageable. The MIDAS announcement comes just days after Borland said it would be spinning its Open Environment Corp consulting division into Boston, Massachusetts-based NetNumina Corp in a bid to cut costs (CI No 3,150), raising fears that development of Open Environment’s Entera intelligent middleware would cease. MIDAS will be incorporated in the company’s Delphi 3, the next version of the client-server suite which will have multi server capabilities. MIDAS is a collection of brokers capable of streamlining client server systems by centralizing business rules and data access on a Windows NT application server. Delphi 3 will be Borland’s first scaleable development tool to build MIDAS- enabled applications. The MIDAS suite includes the Business ObjectBroker, designed for load balancing and fail over security in a multi-tier, business critical environment, and supports network protocols such as Common Object Model and Distributed Component Object Model. The Remote DataBroker enables users to create thin database clients that can be connected to application servers and business objects. MIDAS’s ConstraintBroker has been designed to transmit automated and codeless database rules from the database server to the application. Delphi 3 has been in development for about a year. The company tries to update it on a yearly basis, and the new version is due to ship some time in May. MIDAS acts as a link between Delphi and Entera, and uses some of the Entira technology, though Entera will remain as a product in its own right, used for linking up proprietary systems with PC development tools. MIDAS prices start at $5,000 per server.
