At IonaWorld in San Francisco this week, Iona Technologies Ltd announced Orbix 3, the newest upgrade of its Corba-compliant object request broker. Orbix 3 is not actually Corba 3 ready, mainly because the Object Management has still not signed off on the final specification yet (see related story), but it is Corba 3 ready. It adds COM to Corba integration through the integration of the OrbixCOMet bridge, location and transparency through OrbixNames, rapid application development through a new TCL-based code generation toolkit, and built-in security through the Orbix WonderWall firewall. We’re moving towards a small number of bigger products said Annrai O’Toole, chief technology officer at Iona. Orbix 3, which Iona calls its base level container product, is out now on Sun Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT, for $6,995 per developer on Unix, $2,995 per developer on NT. Next quarter, Orbix OTM 3, the enterprise container version, is due to be launched, including transactions and systems management, SSL security and full Java client and server support, something that Iona claims will make it the first Java object transaction manager. Iona claims to have the largest installed base of any ORB supplier, with 3,500 customers. Running on the same platforms as Orbix 3, OTM 3 will cost $11,000 per developer on Unix, and $6,500 per developer on NT. Also at IonaWorld, Iona added PL/1 support to the OS/390 mainframe version of Orbix. CEO Chris Horn said the mainframe market was now a growing one. A full year’s pre-release on the product begins this month. During his keynote speech, Horn demonstrated an early version of OrbixStudio, the graphical server building technology codenamed Matisse which Iona acquired from Electronic Data Systems Inc last year for $5m (CI No 3,507, 3,514). There’s no release date yet, and Horn said it would probably emerge first as a standalone toolkit. An early adopter program for Artwork, the full implementation of Corba 3 with extra configuration options for getting underneath the ORB and adding custom protocol stacks, begins later this week. Warhol, a messaging and notification system Iona has worked on in collaboration with NEC Corp (CI No 3,369) is also forthcoming.
