IONA ACQUIRES JAVA BEANS FIRM EJBHOME.

Irish object company Iona Technologies Ltd acquired tiny UK Enterprise Java Beans company EJBHome Ltd yesterday on undisclosed terms, and at the same time announced it would become a Java licensee under Sun Microsystems Inc's new "community licensing" terms and conditions, announced at the end of last year. The EJBHome website has been a well-regarded information source for beans developers, and the two developers behind the site, including company president Peter Morgan, have offered developers an EJB server kit free for non-commercial use on their site since June last year. It was one of the first Java beans implementations to reach the market. The latest final beta version 0.4 was completed in October. The server was built on top of RMI rather than Orbix, but Iona says it will change that and integrate native support for EJB into Orbix and its so-called "C3 architecture," a framework supporting DCOM, Corba and Enterprise Java Beans, integrating the necessary support for transactions, security and network management. "Java will be the server language of choice in around two years - the infrastructure's not quite there yet" predicted Annrai O'Toole, chief technology officer at Iona. He said the acquisition had been made because the technology "was easily digestible, a pure EJB implementation written from the ground up." The EJBHome.com site will be continued, Iona said. The two staff at EJBHome will move to Dublin. Iona said the price paid for the company "would not affect its balance sheet."