It’s been a year since the Beaverton, Oregon-based company recast its object database business for three-tier application development and GemStone Inc believes its now about two thirds of the way to meeting the objectives it set itself at that time following the release of its GemStone 5.0 technologies last week. GemStone 4.0 was the initial makeover of the database for use as an object application server, the 4.1 release added some enhancements. GemStone 5.0 includes the anticipated tuning and performance tweaking that means on any given configuration 5.0 could support 50% more users than 4.1; it can also accommodate 50Gb data. Part of the reason is a new virtual machine, which executes code between two and five times faster than GemSto ne 4.1. It also conforms to the emerging ANSI X3J20 Smalltalk standard, which the company says will simplify partitioning and migration across different Smalltalk implementations. Other features include enhanced control of passwords and user identification. The release is up under Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc Unixes and Windows NT. The company is also offering GemConnect gateways, which provide read-write access to Oracle Corp and Sybase Inc relational databases. It claims developers can maintain a clean separation between object models and corporate data using the gateways, which have previously been available only as beta or consulting technologies. There is also a new GemBuilder for Smalltalk, said to improv e partitioning performance over the existing GemStone Smalltalk Interface. GemBuilder enables Small-talk classes to be migrated between clients and servers and works with IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and ParcPlace-DigiTalk’s VisualWave and Visual Smalltalk. There are also GemBuilders for C++ and C. GemAdmin provides graphical user interface-based administration from Windows NT – it says its Unix users are happy to use a command line. GemStone 5.0 products are due this month at $6,000 per user. GemS tone has already integrated its software with ParcPlace-Digitalk’s VisualWave environment for use as an Internet Application Server, claiming it to be the first server to support transaction-oriented World Wide Web applications for thousands of user s (CI No 2,926). GemStone is expected to offer ParcPlace-Digitalk’s Parts for Java tool set as part of a Java product strategy which will include a basic Java interface to the GemStone object server in the fall, with a more robust version to follow. It will add JavaSoft’s Servlet application programming interfaces for building small executables to run on networks or servers somewhere along the way and other development tools in 1997 that will extend existing GemStone environments for use with Java classes. It does not see corporates doing heavy Java work until 1998. There could be an initial public offering of shares under way fairly soon as the company admits it fits underwriters’ current penchant for fast-growing second generation appl ication development houses: the window is now open, it says. GemStone, which claimed revenues of $10m last year, says it will at least double that this year. The company’s single Malaysian investor had already sunk more than $30m into the company by this time last year.
