GemStone looks to ease J2EE adoption

January 12, 2000 — Application server vendor GemStone is taking a double-fisted approach to helping those people who are considering using the recently-released Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development platform but are unsure where to start.

The company this week announced that it has expanded its product line to include four varieties of its J2EE application server, GemStone/J. Those editions are: Web Edition, for building in Servlet/Java Server Page-based architectures; Component Edition, which adds the Enterprise JavaBeans component and has limited caching capabilities; Enterprise Edition, adding CORBA support, security, and unlimited caching; and Commerce Automation Edition, which includes a workflow engine for managing and automating business processes.

The aim of the tiered product offerings, said Doug Pollack, vice president of marketing at GemStone, is to provide a lowered barrier of entry to companies that want to develop J2EE-based applications and to give them an upgrade path to meet their expanding needs as they become more familiar with the platform’s capabilities.

However, GemStone’s approach raises the question of whether or not such product stratification is antithetical to the J2EE promise of being an all-encompassing development platform. Pollack, though, said he feels that this concern is assuaged by GemStone’s ability to make the four variations of GemStone/J completely code compatible.

The second way in which GemStone hopes to facilitate the adoption of J2EE is through a product dubbed I-commerce Success Technology for J2EE. The offering includes open source code and design patterns for developing business-to-business Internet commerce sites using J2EE. Pollack characterized these as helpful models that will position GemStone to take the lead in driving J2EE development.

“Our customers’ greatest issue right now is how to get their staff up to speed on how to architect for J2EE and how to build J2EE applications,” Pollack said. “While we aren’t the biggest player in the market, we do have world class architects that have been doing this stuff for decades and should help us provide strong leadership to the Java community.”

I-commerce Success Technology for J2EE is currently in beta testing, and is expected to be generally available within three to four weeks. In addition to the work it has put in on the program, GemStone is hopeful that Sun will provide some support. That could include making the code and design patterns available through the Java Community Process.

GemStone Systems’ new tiered product offerings are available now on Sun Solaris and Windows NT operating systems with pricing starting at ,950 per CPU for the Web Edition.