Iona Integrates Corba and Java Beans With OrbixHome.

Iona Technologies Ltd claims to be the first to have integrated Corba and Enterprise Java Beans technology through its OrbixHome development environment, announced yesterday. The Dublin, Ireland-based company says the move is the next stage on from last year's merge of Corba with Microsoft Corp's COM. Simultaneously, Symantec Corp said it would be using OrbixHome to extend its own Visual Cafe development tool to support Corba and EJB.

Acquired earlier this year from EJB Home Ltd (CI No 3,589), the EJB server will be demonstrated at the Java One show in San Francisco next month, and is expected to reach its beta test stage in the third quarter of this year. It will run on Windows and NT, Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX and Digital Unix. Iona says the integration work was relatively straightforward, and tied in with work it already had underway before the acquisition on a "Corba Beans" component product. It's expected to continue to offer a free version of the basic product to help seed the marketplace.

Iona spokesman John McGuire, senior product manager for Java middleware products at Iona told Computerwire that although a number of application server vendors were including Corba support in with a long list of standards, such firms were mostly paying only "lip service" to Corba, and still considered it "an outboard engine." Iona says it has taken the ORB infrastructure and services, along with a thin API to EJB so that it's using the same set of services, and made them accessible via a single graphical console, using one security model and one transaction model. While the original EJB Home implementation used RMI for its underlying transport mechanism, Iona has stripped that out in favor of IIOP, the Internet InterORB Protocol. RMI can still be used at a higher, applications level.

Server-side application programming, transactions, security and management are all easier through EJB, but according to Iona there is nothing to help with building the container and server underneath. "A lot of EJB server are built on top of bits of string," McGuire said, claiming that most were just "EJB makeovers." The new product is based on the newer "Moscone" Enterprise Java Beans 1.1 specification. Future versions will include support for the development and deployment of components built in other languages, such as C++ and Cobol, and different component models, such as COM+ and Corba 3.

McGuire said that the Object Management Group and JavaSoft Inc would eventually get round to standardizing EJB and Corba integration, but that it was up to vendors to begin shipping products in the mean time. Symamtec plans to use the product as the basis for an EJB Universal Framework and modules providing "deep integration" between its VisualCafe Enterprise Suite and third party application servers, such as BEA WebLogic, IBM Corp's WebSphere and Sun Microsystems Inc's NetDynamics (see separate story).