In a departure from its retail origins, Symantec Corp has unveiled new software and a new marketing strategy designed to help it tackle the enterprise market. The key to the new venture is Symantec’s Visual Cafe for Java, Enterprise Suite, which the company calls an enterprise rapid application development (ERAD) environment. CEO and president Gordon Eubanks called the launch a major event for Symantec. ERAD is a kind of industrial-strength toolkit for Java, designed to solve the problems inherent in heterogeneous corporate environments. We see a clear mandate from customers that Java is the glue for integrating legacy applications, said Eubanks. As Mansour Safi, Symantec’s vice president internet tools, explains: There used to be COBOL people, Unix hackers and Windows developers. Now the same developer is being asked to integrate all those legacy systems. That’s bad for developers but good for Symantec, Safi says, a complicated problem is an opportunity for a development tool writer. With Symantec’s ERAD tools, developers can write applications in Java to run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Windows NT. It’s not a new idea, but some of the functionality provided in Visual Cafe for Java Enterprise Suite is fresh. To my knowledge not a single tool exists that supports debugging across networks with a single system image, says Safi. A demo suggests that the new Cafe can do just that. One window in the interface lists all the virtual machines participating in a given application. Developers can debug each thread in their software, no matter whether it’s running on their desktop machine or a remote server. You are sitting here on an NT box, says Safi, looking at pieces of your application distributed across the entire network. This isn’t even software that’s on the hard drive. This is software that’s running. Whether this is a single system image, as Symantec would like you to believe, or a single application image, as some of its users prefer to call it, remote debugging has obvious uses in developing distributed applications. Cafe also boasts the features you’d expect of any visual development environment, including drag-and-drop linking of objects and wizards for client and server processes. The idea is to make programming look much easier than it is. As Safi puts it: Once you have the tools the whole thing becomes more of a Lego situation. Visual Cafe for Java Enterprise Suite supports the usual suspects as far as middle-tier application servers and object request brokers are concerned. As yet, however, there’s no sign of support for automated testing environments, something of an oversight in a product with enterprise-level pretensions. Developer partners include Novera, Iona, Weblogic, Platinum Technology, BEA Systems, Oracle, Netscape and Sun. Banc of America and The Gap are beta customers. The software is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 1998, with pricing determined on a case-by-case basis. Just because the company is now wooing big business doesn’t mean it wants to lose touch with its traditional customers. Symantec says that it fully intends to maintain its existing toolkits for the retail market while rolling out the enterprise suite.
