Gtech Holdings Corp of West Greenwich, Rhode Island, has become a strategic partner and taken a $5m equity stake in Jyacc Inc’s Prolifics company. Gtech supplies computerised on-line lottery products and services to 79 lotteries world-wide, and uses Prolifics’ tool for the development of its transactional systems. Prolifics says it will use the injection of cash to market the new version of its eponymous transactional web application development environment, version 3.0. The capital is hoped to help Prolifics attack the application development market more successfully than its Jyacc parent – Jyacc won a lamentable 3,000 user sites in 18 years. Prolifics – which has drawn technology from Jyacc’s JAM and JAM/WEB tools – is said to be a partitioned, multi-tiered object-oriented development environment, which integrates with the Tuxedo transaction processing middleware licensed from BEA Systems Inc. Prolifics claims version 3.0 is the first tool of its kind to offer ‘Java Fail Safe’. That’s what the company is calling the ability for the application to automatically switch to hypertext mark-up language HTML should the browser not support Java. The company says Java is often not supported on the client due to lack of either a browser’s support for it, firewalls, or even company policy – so an application that relies solely on Java is often not capable of serving all of the users.
Transparently substituted
According to the company HTML is transparently substituted should the Java execution fail. 3.0 also extends Prolifics’ Distributed Transaction Object Model (D/TOM) to Java applications. With D/TOM Java applications are said to be easily integrated into a distributed database and transactional environment, without the need for hand-coded SQL or the use of JDBC. According to Prolifics president Frank Vafier, JDBC is not the way to connect to databases because each user requires a separate connection: That means when you have 1,000 users you need 1,000 connections – you’re going to bring the database to its knees, he says. With D/TOM, processes are automatically distributed between the client, the web server and the transaction server, improving performance and reliability according to Vafier. Version 3.0 also includes some ‘push’ transactions functionality – a Push Transaction architecture means that one event can trigger another. In this way someone trying to book a seat on a plane could be automatically notified if a seat becomes available, without them having to keep returning to a web site. Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is apparently gearing up to resell Prolifics 3.0 in Europe. Prolifics 3.0 will ship in September for SunOS 4.x, Windows NT and Sun Solaris. HP-UX, IBM AIX, SCO OpenServer, SGI, Macintosh and Digital Unix versions will be available in October.
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