Open Environment Corp (OEC), the three-tier application company currently being swallowed by Borland International Inc is breaking its Entera second generation development environment into discrete PowerPack modules it says will allow developers to create specific types of application servers on top of a new Web-enabled toolset it’s offering called Mambo. Boston, Massachusetts-based OEC is using SoftQuad International Inc’s HotMetal Pro 2.0 web authoring tool in Mambo for creating partitioned applications that are accessed from web browsers. OEC has stripped the relational connectivity technologies from Entera and is bundling them in the initial version of Mambo for creating web-enabled relational database applications. The $2,500 Mambo suite is said to run on all web servers and four PowerPack modules will be available late summer for building transactional servers, adding mainframe application integration, management facilities and others functions on top of it. There’s a run-time charge of $500 for each additional database system supported. Mambo, available now, generates C, C++ and HTML code, common gateway interface executables and HTML template forms that act as application clients that read and write to application databases. OEC has no plans to offer the Verity Inc Topic Search text retrieval engine SoftQuad will include in a new version of HotMetal Pro later this year and says Mambo is aimed at MIS shops rather than webmasters. Mambo can also be used to web-enable applications being developed by existing Entera customers. OEC claims to be in talks with Open Market Inc and Netscape Comunications Corp about creating web server packages that include Mambo and the PowerPacks. Meantime OEC is re-working Entera’s connectivity options, abandoning its own proprietary remote procedure call as well as the reqiurement to run the whole of the Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment if DCE RPC is used, in favor of a stripped-out native DCE RPC that vendors such as DEC, HP and IBM are embedding in their operating systems at no additional charge. OEC says it’s also interoperable with Microsoft Corp’s DCE RPC variant. Sun is supporting the RPC as a federated service option. OEC says the native RPC will allow customers to create applications using Entera without having to license the whole DCE kit and kaboodle. It’ll continue to support existing users of its own RPC where required. In addition OEC says it’s now got a prototype version of Entera integrated with its future parent’s Latte Java development environment. The plan is to offer a complete enterprise-class Java development environment with Entera at the back-end and Latte on the front. It may offer a similar combination of Entera with Borland’s Delphi and other C++ technologies though that’s not yet been decided, it says. Borland’s $64m acquisition of OEC through a share swap is due to complete in early August.
