Candle Corp’s got the likes of IBM Corp, Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp cooing over its forthcoming Roma software which will supposedly enable customers to deploy applications which can run over multiple asynchronous messaging environments (CI No 3,239). Roma also uses a LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol system to dynamically locate and route data. Roma, which begins customer testing next quarter and will be available as a suite of products in 1998, will support IBM MQSeries and Microsoft Message Queue Server (Falcon) initially, though the company recognizes it will need to support other messaging environments down the road such as Tibco Inc’s TibNet and the relational database vendors’ own message products; the Object Management Group is also working to enable Corba for messaging. Currently ISVs must hardwire applications to use a specific messaging product. Candle says Roma shields interface logic from the uniqueness of the underlying messaging middleware APIs. The use of LDAP makes the locations of message queues and associated services transparent to the application and is used route the application request to the specified location, utilizing the defined message transport; either MQSeries or Falcon. It also means the application is not bound to the location of the server, giving it location transparency. Applications written to Roma APIs and deployed on top of a layer of Roma middleware will be able to take advantage of multiple message environments. Although users will be able to implement Roma independently of other Candle products, the San Diego, California-based mainframe software management company expects to make money by selling other management products that work on top of Roma. The technology won’t be retro-fitted into Candle’s existing messaging products but they will work together the company insists. Candle’s quite happy that Meta Group analysts have described Roma as an ORB [object request broker] but not an ORB. It want to leverage what ever opportunity object technology has to offer and thinks the ORB community needs to do messaging to advance its credibility and usefulness. Candle has been showing Roma off at this week’s Electronic Messaging Association conference.