By William Fellows
Look for middleware vendor Iona Technologies Inc to dip more toes into enterpise application integration waters following the announcement of its Warhol messaging and notification system developed with NEC Corp (CI No 3,589). Iona says it’s clear now that middleware, EAI, distributed component development and other parts of the software industry are each working towards the same goal of providing a unified, transaction-based application environment for the internet that is platform and architecture independent. Consolidation is even apparent in the use of the same language to describe activities and aims, it observes, but who can bring it all together? Iona picked up Enterprise Java Beans ISV EJBHome as part of its grand unifying strategy for middleware, which includes marrying Microsoft Corp’s COM+ object model with Corba. Even Sun, Iona claims, admits that Corba is the infrastructure most used under EJB. In its view, COM and EJB are at about the same level of use as far as real world development is concerned. It thinks the whole COM-on-Unix issue to be a red herring. At Iona World yesterday, Sun’s director of enterprise Java said that the specifications for the next version of EJB, codenamed Moscone, would be released in the second quarter of this year, making a reference implementation possible by year-end. That release will add further support for XML. A year later, Sun plans to launch the Javits release, adding links to legacy enterprise resource planning applications. Beyond that comes Milano, supporting entity beans, said Chandra. Sun also plans to launch a Java Server Pages equivalent to Microsoft Corp’s Active Server Pages next quarter, for the development of reusable Web components.
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