By William Fellows
Inprise Inc says it will unveil new products next week for the growing army of developers writing internet applications for large organizations, as it struggles to regain the firm grip it once had on the programming community. Until recently, Inprise (formerly Borland International) was better known for its desktop PC programming tools until Microsoft, the advent of Java and internet programming models quickly made a commodity out of Borland’s market, to which it responded too slowly. That’s why the company has changed its name, overhauled its executive management and decided to focus on Java and the enterprise through its acquisition of Visigenic Software Inc in a bid to re- establish shareholder value.
WebCore is a new enterprise Java beans (EJB) server that enables programs to run and be managed on networks of systems. Until now Inprise has offered the ability to write Java programs using Jbuilder on top of a basic network plumbing infrastructure called Corba. It says EJB containers can be written on VisiBroker. Now those programs can also be deployed and managed using the WebCore runtime environment and a management application called AppCenter. Inprise’s particular type of Corba piping is called VisiBroker object request broker (ORB), now at release 4.0. Inprise says customers no longer need to go to third parties for any piece of a distributed solution and that the combination offers transactions, scalability and two-phase commit.
Inprise claims leading ORB company Iona Technologies Ltd’s OrbixHome product is not an EJB server but simply an EJB add-on to its ORB. Inprise claims to be the first company to offer EJB application deployment on Corba 2.3. It faces stiff competition from other EJB server companies including BEA Systems, SilverStream, BlueStone, Sun and others. Pricing will be set when the products become available.
Meantime, Inrpise has appointed former VP mergers and acquisitions at KLA-Tencor Corp as its new CFO and promoted Jay Leite to SVP and GM. Leite is to run a new business unit to develop internet and wireless technologies.
