New crop of app servers take root

April 15, 1999 — Application server vendors Persistence, GemStone, and Sybase are introducing upgraded products this month that in different ways ratchet up the functionality behind building and housing Internet-based enterprise applications.

Persistence on April 19 is announcing the release of PowerTier for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 5.0, an early implementation of Java remote method invocation (RMI) over Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) technology that also introduces a clustering capability called PowerSync.

The use of RMI over IIOP in PowerTier offers “the flexibility of Java and the strength of CORBA,” said Erik Frieberg, vice president of marketing at Persistence.

The PowerSync feature provides the capability to cluster PowerTier servers and synchronize their caches via the Internet for a “highly available environment for business-to-business applications. You can have fail-over on many machines, and/or split up the caches for load balancing,” Frieberg said.

The product, now in beta testing and shipping June 15, also features a command center for centralized control over the various servers. Persistence plans to link the console to major management systems in a future release.

“I think [PowerTier 5.0] is a big improvement over what Persistence had before. There’s lots of work inside the kernel: The object caching gives a lot better scaling, and load-balancing services. And by using RMI over IIOP they have a much better front end to their system,” said Anne Thomas, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group, in Boston.

GemStone Systems will announce April 26 that the GemStone/J 3.0 Enterprise Java application server will ship in May with integrated object transaction monitor services, deeper security, Persistence Cache Architecture, and distributed multithreaded virtual machines, the company said.

The server also supports several of the technologies to be included in the forthcoming Java 2, Enterprise Edition, platform due in June from Sun Microsystems. GemStone/J 3.0 will support servlets, Java Server Pages, and EJB components, said Steve Seminario, director of product marketing at GemStone.

The server will also be integrated more tightly with leading Web servers Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, and Netscape Enterprise Server.

“By having load balancing that plugs into the APIs, with those Web servers you can vector requests to a servlet execution engine that runs in the GemStone virtual machines,” Seminario said. “That allows servlets to execute more business logic, and tap databases, and talk to many kinds of objects, and return the results in the form of Java Server Pages in an HTML page that gets to the browser without the need for a [Java virtual machine] on the client.”

Analysts praised GemStone’s certificates-based security features.

“GemStone security puts them in the lead as far as security goes, at least for now,” said Mike Gilpin, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, in Cambridge, MA.

“GemStone is an interesting contrast with Persistence, which is an object-relational mapping solution. It’s not always the best solution, to map,” Gilpin said. “If you had an application with very complex logic, that might be better for GemStone’s server.”

Sybase on April 19 will ship Enterprise Application Studio 3.0, consisting of PowerBuilder 7.0, PowerJ 3.0, and Enterprise Application Server 3.0.

The products, which can be purchased separately or together at ,495 per developer seat, provide tighter integration between Sybase’s PowerBuilder fourth-generation language tool and the Java PowerJ tool so developers familiar with PowerBuilder can create distributed server applications, said Bill Bartow, vice president of engineering and marketing at Sybase’s Internet Applications Division.

Also new to Sybase’s latest offering is the Web DataWindow, which separates presentation logic from data logic, so developers can use easy tools an create business logic in graphical way and define how to access data, Bartow explained.

“Web DataWindow makes it approachable for mainstream developers to build Internet apps that also scale, and do it in a graphical way. We take care of the plumbing,” Bartow said.

“Sybase’s server is good in that it can run so many kinds of components,” said Giga’s Gilpin. “But PowerJ has the potential to be a higher-level product. Sybase has a transitional strategy, and we think they should invest in PowerJ and make it more competitive.”

Gilpin said that Visual Basic and PowerBuilder developers cannot easily move to Java tools, a limitation that creates an opening for integrated tools-application server vendors such as Progress Software, Vision Software, and SilverStream.