As expected, Boston, Massachusetts-based Open Environment Corp is changing gear, aiming to move from its position as a supplier of tools to the distributed application development industry, to becoming one in its own right, a full-blown second generation enterprise application development house a la Dynasty Technology Inc and Forte Software Inc (CI No 2,588). Release 2.1 of Open Environment’s Entera suite, formerly Encompass, now includes two-phase commit for Oracle, Ingres and Informix databases – a further release will be required for Sybase – which the company says eliminates the need for a transaction processing monitor – new run-time environments, additional compiler support and front-end support for ParcPlace Systems Inc’s VisualWorks Smalltalk development environment. As part of its plan to run across all client, server and legacy systems, Open Environment is jointly developing an implementation of Magna Software Corp’s Magna X Unix-to-mainframe Cobol high-level language transaction processing environment for use with Entera later this summer. It will generate code for Entera rather than the Transarc Corp Encina transaction processing monitor that Magna uses. Entera runs over Distributed Computing Environment and Open Environment’s proprietary Remote Procedure Call – it has half a dozen or so Distributed Computing Environment users, out of 70 in total – and will support Object Linking & Embedding in its next release, plus Apertus Technologies Inc’s screen scraper and the Blyth Software Inc Omnis development system later. It is looking at a Common Object Request Broker Architecture/Common Object Model implementation. The company has also developed a lightweight gateway to run remote procedure calls from Windows or Macintosh for those that have found Gradient Technologies Inc’s PC-Distributed Computing Environment too cumbersome, or that want access from the Macintosh. It is also planning to offer the gateway unbundled. Entera, which also runs across TCP/IP, is from $16,000 per developer and $2,000 per run-time server licence; applications can be supported under Distributed Computing Environment without recompilation, the company claims. It expects to complete its initial public offering in a week or so.
