Tel Aviv, Israel-based Magic Software Enterprises Ltd has launched what it says is the industry’s first Internet transaction processing rapid application development engine, MagicWeb. The company says that with its new tool, developers will be able to build complex Internet transaction processing applications of limitless scalability for large-scale enterprise intranets and Internet commerce. Any client that supports a browser will have access to the application. One of the problems faced by developers writing such applications is how to overcome the inherently ‘stateless’ nature of the Internet – the communication between the client and server is made up of one-off requests, and the server does not keep track of the nature of those requests over time. Magic says it has solved this with the Magic State Manager, which is said to maintain a virtual connection between the server and client. Each request is directed by the State Manager to the Magic application, where the nature of this request is stored. According to the company this makes it seem like the client is having a conversation, not merely sending one-off requests. The Magic Broker module is said to solve another inherent problem in Internet-based transaction processing applications, as it offers load-balancing between multiple Magic servers, so traffic to a busy server is automatically re-routed. This, and the fact that the Internet itself means one-off requests to – and responses from – a server, is said to enable up to ten times the number of concurrent users on a single server than would be possible with traditional client/server applications. At the moment MagicWeb generates the business logic and technical configuration, but does not generate HTML pages. These must be generated with third party HTML authoring tools, and they are then added to the front-end with the Magic Merge tool. In the next release of MagicWeb, expected in the third quarter of this year, HTML pages will be generated automatically. Also expected in that release is the implementation of the Magic presentation layer as a Java applet, enabling an increased level of processing to be carried out on the client, decreasing the amount of network traffic between client and server. MagicWeb was developed in conjunction with Web Dynamics Inc, a US-based Magic partner which specializes in Internet tools. It is currently available for Sun Microsystems Inc Solaris, Windows 95 and Windows NT servers, and other major Unixes are expected soon. Despite Magic’s claims to uniqueness, others, including Progress Software Corp with its WebSpeed product (CI No 3,012) have been talking along much the same lines.
