App Servers to Comply With J2EE

The application server market continues to bustle, with new releases on the horizon from BEA Systems Inc., Borland Software Corp. and IBM.

BEA, of San Jose, Calif., late last month started shipping WebLogic Server 6.0, which company officials say is more powerful, yet easier to use, and meets the requirements of J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) conformance tests.

“The most significant thing is the increased distributed transaction capability,” said Randy Heffner, director of application architecture for Giga Information Group Inc., in Dallas. “BEA was previously pursuing the direction where WebLogic got additional transactional capabilities by tighter integration with Tuxedo [the companys transaction server]. They realized they needed to build a fully functional [transaction engine] into WebLogic itself.”

BEA also announced an agreement with partner PentaSafe Security Technologies Inc., of Houston, to build a layer of enhanced security for WebLogic. VigilEnt Security Agent for WebLogic, now in alpha testing, will lock down the servers content, protect the server environment from intruders and provide protection for deployed applications, PentaSafe officials said.

Also in the application server market, Borland, which recently changed its name from Inprise Corp., has come out with a new version of AppServer.

AppServer 4.5 was unveiled at the E-Business Expo in New York last month. Officials with Borland, of Scotts Valley, Calif., said the latest version offers better scalability and reliability as well as enhanced integration with back-end systems. Using the J2EE connector specification, an emerging standard from Sun Microsystems Inc. expected to be included in the next version of J2EE, AppServer 4.5 provides integration with third-party tools such as Rational Software Corp.s Universal Modeling Language tools, Thought Inc.s database connectivity tool and Borlands own JBuilder tool.

The latest version includes sample applications to help customers quickly create e-commerce applications and get them up and running in less than 3 hours. AppServer 4.5 also provides the ability to make hot deployments and hot upgrades, preventing users from having to shut the whole system down to upgrade or add a new Enterprise JavaBean.

The server is J2EE-compliant and includes Borlands VisiBroker, an Internet application development tool.

IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., has rolled out several releases of its WebSphere application server over the past year. Late last month, IBM announced the availability of both standard and advanced editions of WebSphere 3.5 for Linux.