An Alternative App Server

Pramati Technologies wants to give developers a lower-cost alternative to application servers offered by major vendors such as BEA Systems Inc. and IBM.

The Hyderabad, India, company last week rolled out its Pramati Server 3.0 application server and Pramati Studio 3.0 IDE, which officials said bring the latest standard technologies to users looking for an attractive price/performance alternative to market leading solutions.

Pramati Server 3.0 is among the first Java application servers to meet the certification requirements for J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) 1.3 compatibility. Pramati Studio 3.0 is an integrated development environment for building J2EE applications.

Pramati is targeting small-to-medium-size enterprises with 3.0, said company CEO Jay Pullur. According to Pullur, Pramati is able to keep its prices down—to less than a third of that of competitors—because of less overhead and the fact that it has more than 100 J2EE engineers in India, where costs are lower. The lowest price Pramati offers is a two-CPU license for $5,000, Pullur said.

Pullur said Pramati Server 3.0 was built with the J2EE standard in mind, and no proprietary code has been added. It comes with an Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 container and provides such features as load balancing, failover and hot deployment, as well as remote monitoring via a Web-based console.

Meanwhile, Pramati Studio is application server agnostic, company officials said, and supports direct deployment to several J2EE-compliant application servers, including the popular servers from BEA and Oracle Corp. as well as Pramatis own server. Pramati Studio includes a migration tool that allows code created with it to be moved from one application server to another at the touch of a button, Pullur said.

Among Pramatis more than 20 customers is ViewSet Inc., a Herndon, Va., solutions provider. Technical architect Marcus Achiume said ViewSet has been using Pramati Server and Studio 3.0 products for three months to help build software that will enable its customers to automatically process health care records, a key to getting compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations recently introduced by the government. The new software featuring Pramatis technology is expected to be generally available within two months.

In another Java application server announcement, Lutris Technologies Inc., of Santa Cruz, Calif., last week made available a preview version of Lutris EAS 4.1.1 for the Apple Mac OS X platform. The upcoming application server features Java Services Architecture, Web services capabilities, enterprise-quality clustering and reliability, and wireless and voice presentation.

Lutris made the decision to support the Unix-based Apple Computer Inc. platform with the expectation of OS X making inroads with enterprise Java developers, the company said.