Rapid application development tool specialist Vision Software Inc, from Oakland, California, has unveiled its Jade Java Application Development Environment which it claims is the first product of its kind to manage logic, data and presentation functions within business applications. Jade is designed to enable application developers to create business applications by defining the business rules. The tool then generates multi-tiered component-based Java applications which can be distributed to run on any client browser utilizing Java applets and across multiple application servers. The tool supports standard application servers and object standards such as CORBA/IIOP object request brokers, Microsoft Corp’s DCOM Distributed Common Object Model and MTS Transaction Server, as well as JDBC Java Database Connectivity servers. Jade can automate the development of large scale Java applications aimed at the intranet, says the company. Managing director Warwick Longman, who admits that Brisbane, California-based USoft Corp is doing similar things, says that Vision is after those customers who can’t justify the costs involved in paying for a system to be hand-built, especially when the system has only got a life-span of two to three years. Our attitude to application development is hand-crafted as against hand-built…we think that’s where the industry’s going. Vision expects to release version 3.0 of its flagship Vision Builder product by the end of the year; Jade and the current version of Vision Builder are shipping now with prices starting at $3,000 and $4,000 respectively.
