Low-profile New York software development tools house JYACC Inc – the firm behind the JAM proprietary language tool – has formed a new company to sell its latest product, a three-tiered Web-enabled application development environment. The new company and the new product are both named Prolifics, and JYACC’s former executive vice-president and chief technical officer, Frank Vafier, takes on the role as president. This is JYACC’s second spin-off this year: in January its professional services and technical consultancy arm, based in Massachusetts, was re-named Quadris. JYACC itself is now just a holding company for the two. Prolifics uses some JAM (and the more recent two-tier JAM/Web) technology, but the new product – described as multi-tiered, partitioned and object-oriented – is aimed at customers looking to deploy transaction-based applications over the Web. It uses a drag and drop visual programming tool for Web and graphical user interface development, works with standard browsers, implements what Prolifics calls a Transactional Object Model, and is integrated with Tuxedo transaction processing middleware licensed from BEA Systems Inc. Future plans include a version using the Java-enabled Jolt implementation of Tuxedo. Prolifics is giving away some basic single-user Web applications such as take-away restaurant order screens and employee registration systems to start customers off. Five-user development systems start at $35,000 on Windows NT, Unix and VMS systems. Th e new name also marks a change of attitude, says JYACC chairman Bob Ismach: whereas privately-held JYACC took 18 years to grow its user base to 3,000 sites, mostly by word of mouth, and was largely eclipsed by its market-aggressive competitors, Prolifics this time intends to seize the position of market leadership. It sees its main competition as the three-tier development companies such as Forte Software Inc and Dynasty Technologies Inc, and fellow proprietary language vendor firms such as Progress Software Corp and Uniface BV.
