Iona to Cut Java Prices

Iona Technologies will use the JavaOne annual conference for Java developers in San Francisco this week to launch its next-generation Java software at reduced prices.

"We believe the Java 2 Enterprise Edition [J2EE] market is about to become a volume market. The application server is about to become a commodity. Were leading that charge," said John Rymer, vice president of product marketing at Iona.

Release 3.0 of Ionas iPortal Application Server will be available in an annual $495 single developers subscription and an annual $1,495 group developer subscription. Deployment licenses will cost $2,500 per CPU, compared with the more typical $12,000 to $15,000 for a one-time license.

The move to low-cost annual subscriptions "reduces the cost of entry," Rymer said, but technical support costs an additional $800.

A set of Web service development tools called the iPortal XMLBus is included in the iPortal Application Server. And the Sonic Software Sonic MQ Java Messaging Service is now included in the package.

The iPortal XMLBus allows application-to-application exchange of eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-formatted data and Java application data. That should allow for increased business-to-business communications, said Ed Gaudet, vice president of worldwide marketing at Iona.

The iPortal XMLBus also makes it easier for developers to build in asynchronous communications, which dont require immediate connections and responses from a target host. Instead, asynchronous communications allow a message to be stored and forwarded when the link can be established, receiving confirmation upon receipt, said Simon Pepper, Ionas J2EE application product director.

The JavaOne conference runs today through June 8.