Sun spills beans on future EJB releases

February 3, 1999 — In San Francisco, Sun Microsystems detailed the future releases of its Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) product during the closing keynote at Iona World.

At the conference, Mala Chandra, director of Enterprise Java at Sun, went through the history of EJB and the Java 2 platform before talking about future versions of EJB and the importance of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to the Java platform.

The specifications for the next release of EJB, code-named Moscone, will be available in the second quarter of this year, with a reference implementation due by the end of the year, Chandra said.

“The major focus of the Moscone release is to tighten up [EJB] 1.0 and to use XML for deployment descriptors,” Chandra said.

After Moscone, Sun will introduce the next release, code-named Javits, with specifications expected in the first quarter of the year 2000. Javits will concentrate mainly on connecting to legacy data such as enterprise resource planning systems, said Chandra.

After Javits, Sun will deliver plans for the Milano release of EJB, which Chandra said would deliver entity beans.

Chandra said other future EJB plans involve building a reference implementation for the Enterprise Java platform, which would include compatibility tests. Sun is also planning to deliver benchmark tests to enable developers to measure the performance of EJB applications.

Chandra said EJB and CORBA are also closely related, noting that CORBA is required for the Java 2 platform.

The company spokesperson also noted that Sun would deliver Java Server Pages (JSP) next quarter, which uses Java as a scripting language. She said one of the main differences between JSP and Microsoft’s Active Server Page (ASP) technology is that JSPs are compiled as servlets and not interpreted like ASPs.

“It’s very handy for reusable Web components,” Chandra said.

XML will play a key role in Sun’s enterprise plans, according to Chandra. “XML is a key part of enterprise computing, especially for data interchange,” Chandra said.

Chandra said Sun is currently planning to submit a “Java-to-XML” proposal to a standards body, adding “We have Java-to-XML public on the Web now and people can download it and give us feedback”.

At the show, Iona Technologies Chief Technology Officer Annrai O’Toole discussed future plans for EJB with its acquisition on Monday of EJB Home Limited, a developer of EJB technology and components.

O’Toole said Iona was attracted to the company because “it’s a pure EJB implementation rather than EJB being grafted onto other technologies.” The technologies would be added to the company’s OrbixWeb product, which would enable an EJB server to run on top of OrbixWeb, Iona’s Java-CORBA development environment.

O’Toole expects the EJB integration to be ready to ship in April. He also said Iona plans to integrate EJB into the company’s middleware container and integrate it with ObjectStudio, the company’s upcoming graphic server building product.

O’Toole said Iona would roll out other product strategies related to EJB in April.