Novera Software Inc, one of the first companies to take server- side Java seriously, has come up with its third generation of products and has repositioned itself away from a network operating systems vendor to one offering Java development and Java application and management servers as an integrated package. The Burlington, Massachusetts company used to offer something called EPIC, (Enterprise Platform Internet Computing), but, using that as a technology foundation, has developed three separate products and branded it all under the title jBusiness, aping the current ‘e’ prefix that is the software industry’s current prefix of choice. Novera has chosen this week’s JavaOne conference to launch the application server element, which is in early deployment. The company’s VP of marketing David Butler said the new elements in the product line are four-fold. Firstly the ability to support multi-weight clients, by which he means the products support pure HTML, whereas previously only Java applets and applications could be used to access and display data. Secondly, the company has added pre-built servlet components supporting the Java Servlet API alternative to Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Thirdly, it has added Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support for secure transaction, and lastly, the ability to switch on the fly between HTTP and Corba’s IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) tunneling. The company also announced its support for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). Butler said the EPIC work, which was first announced to the world in October 1996, should now be viewed as the first and second generation of its products. He added that the company, which raised second-round funding last July, is not looking for additional funding at the moment. Novera application server, including a bundled LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server, and the Novera management server, which defines and maintains system resources are available now starting at $10,000. The component development environment , which is used to develop session and entity Bean models goes from $3,500.
