Inprise Corporation yesterday announced its new Application Server suite which the company says will provide users with all the tools they need to develop, deploy and manage distributed object-oriented applications across their networks. Speaking at the keynote address of Inprise’s annual user conference in Denver, Zach Urlocker, Inprise’s VP marketing said the suite comprises the first full implementation of the Object Management Group’s object transactional specification, with its VisiBroker Integrated Transaction Service (ITS) – a CORBA and Java-based middleware solution. It says this will allow companies to write scalable applications for conducting business transactions over the internet. The suite also features a new management solution, called AppCenter, which will enable central management of distributed applications. Featuring a Java-based user interface, Appcenter enables systems administrators to view all components of the distributed applications across the network and set priorities to configure the behavior of the applications. Visibroker SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) also provides secure communication between components of a distributed application, protecting them from corruption, encrypting data and authenticating clients and servers. Urlocker admitted that the technology was still very cutting edge and only being adopted by the risk-takers, like companies in the banking and finance, telecoms and healthcare industries who want to use the technology to gain competitive edge. The company is due to launch its Oracle Application Server at the end of this month. The company also announced a strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc to team Inprise’s development technologies with Sun’s Solaris operating environment. The two companies said the alliance would mean that corporations will be able to take advantage of Inprise’s development tools for building and running enterprise applications on Solaris operating environment. Dr Alan Baratz, president of Java Software said the two companies will continue to migrate Sun customers to Inprise’s VisiBroker object request broker. Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems announced a migration services agreement for users of the full-featured Solaris NEO(TM) ORB, to make the transition to VisiBroker for Java and VisiBroker for C++ ORB technology. Sun Microsystems and Inprise are now providing consulting as well as documentation that maps key NEO features to VisiBroker features to streamline the transition between ORBs.
