IBM Corp is now shipping VisualAge for Java and it’s accompanying WebRunner toolkit, which were both announced back in April. The WebRunner technology, which comes from the company’s Taligent Inc subsidiary provides the JavaBeans support for the VisualAge development tool. It will be available at a discount with the Professional edition of VisualAge and free for a year with the Enterprise version, which is due to ship in August. The Beans will be available on a subscription basis from a secure part of the IBM website for $150 a year. WebRunner at the moment has three sets of Beans: Network Beans, for connection to various network protocols, UI Beans for building interfaces and something new, Gauge Beans, which create things like dials, counters and oscilloscopes on the fly. It also includes so-called Bean Dipping technology, codenamed Bean Extender, which wraps Beans in logic before and after the Bean for such things as security. IBM says at the moment the security only comprises basic things such as password-protection for web pages. IBM said the work to make Java Corba-compatible is being done across the company, but not at Taligent. Both products are available now from the company’s web sites, but there are no prices yet. VisualAge for Java runs on Windows NT, 95 and OS/2 at present. Support for AIX is promised by the year-end, followed by Solaris and HP-UX. There are plans to tie VisualAge for Java to OS/400 and MVS, as IBM put it, but there are no plans for native versions. VisualAge for Java Professional edition costs $100 per user, but there are no prices for next month’s Enterprise edition yet, which will include workgroup technology for developers.
