Oakland, California based Forte is only now putting its Forte Application Environment Release 3 into beta, with the expectation of its first production shipments in the second quarter of next year. Forte’s plans to ship the release before year-end were scuppered when it decided it needed to write Java integration facilities using the IIOP Internet Inter-ORB Protocol standard, rather than hard-coding them. Java integration forms phase 2 in Forte’s Internet/intranet strategy (CI No 2,892). Phase 1 was the shipment in June this year of Forte Web SDK, which enabled Web browsers to function as Forte clients using a customized Common Gateway Interface (CGI). The second phase – the addition of enhanced integration with Java – will now be included in Release 3. The Java integration – only available to customers who have bought Web SDK – will provide interoperability between Java and any CORBA 2.0-compliant products via IIOP. Java applets using an IIOP-compliant object broker should be able to call Forte services. It comes courtesy of Visigenic Software Inc’s VisiBroker, which Forte is using. Release 3 also brings Forte Applets, small blocks of Forte code that can be downloaded from Forte servers for various tasks, like order entry, and the ability to update Web and non-Web clients without taking the server off-line. Other enhancements include support for ActiveX and OLE, and a standalone option for mobile computer users. Forte is already talking about Release 4, on which it is already working. It should include things like the automatic generation of Java client code, and even more legacy and desktop integration. But Release 4 won’t be around until the last quarter of 1998 at the earliest.
