Hi David,
Good questions - I feel like I'm in a consulting session!
1st - Example of a 3-tier dev tool/seems like a good market
Forte, Dynasty Technology and IBM's VisualAge Generator are some examples of 3-tier tools. The problem in the past with some of these tools was that they used proprietary middleware - this has now been rectified and for the most part, these tools allow for 3rd party middleware solutions. Yes, it seems like a great market on the outset - the main problem is 1. the expense and 2. lack of a large group of developers that know how to use them. (Hence the possible benefit to MS and InPrise.)
2nd - your question regarding VB producing unacceptably long path lengths for TP due to its origins as a GUI builder.
This appears to be a VB specific problem, as there are 3-tier dev. tools that do not suffer these problems. That is not to say that InPrise will not have the same issue - just that at this point no one can say as its too soon to have customer feedback.
3rd - your question regarding what it is that actually produces the ease of use from an enterprise perspective, as opposed to the desktop perspective that is InPrise's history.
I think I understand the question (if I don't answer it though let me know). In the sense that InPrise is defining itself in the market of "enterprise tools" - they are talking about the ability to handle 3-tier environments (support for back-end infrastructure services in addition to GUI interfaces).
InPrise is positioning its new products (app server and ITS) to provide object-oriented application services (such as transactions, security, load balancing, messaging - in essence everything middleware provides) with ease.
The idea is that a customer can use Borland dev tools that connect to the middleware infrastructure (app server) to create "enterprise-level" applications. From an enterprise tool perspective, ease of use in this case would be to shield developers from the requirement of writing directly to the middleware - they will instead use the Bor tools and add middleware services as required. Previously, Borland tools were focused on developing a front-end client that would directly access a DB (no middleware involved).
To do so, Borland needed to acquire a middleware vendor (hence the purchase of Visigenic).
If you take a look at the previous work Visigenic was doing with Netscape and the creation of the product Caffeine - you can begin to see what they are trying to do. The Caffeine product allowed developers to write their applications in Java - never look at a line of CORBA IDL code - yet they would be creating CORBA-enabled applications. The ITS product is so named (Integrated Transaction Service) because the TP attributes are not in a seperate system with an ORB connection (this is in contrast to BEA's M3 and IBM CB), the idea is that it may be possible to hide the invocation of application services in addition to CORBA IDL within a GUI environment.
Sorry, kind of rambled there - but I hope that helps.
- Karen |
