NobleNet Announces "Component API" Technology; EZ-APIs simplify multiple API integration, allow developer enhancements.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 1996--NobleNet, Inc. announces its EZ-API product family, the first example of commercial "Component APIs."

Using NobleNet's innovative "OneDriver" architecture, EZ-APIs simplify the integration of industry-standard and custom APIs and enable developers to enhance API functions.

Because OneDriver tightly bundles a standard network transport with each API, multiple APIs can share client, server and network resources. Component API technology automatically multiplexes API calls over a single network connection between client and server, and presents them to the server as a single user process. By tightly integrating multiple APIs on the server, application efficiency is increased, and servers can take on multiple API "personalities."

In addition, EZ-APIs encapsulate each API function call in a modifiable source code wrapper on both the client and server, allowing developers to add enhancements to standard APIs such as security, auditing, compression, naming and caching. This is achieved without modifying API behavior.

NobleNet's EZ-API family reflects an industry shift away from custom communications interfaces and towards standard C-based procedural APIs such as Microsoft's Open Database Connectivity API (ODBC) and Novell's Telephony Services API (TSAPI). Although this leaves developers with the need to find a framework to efficiently integrate multiple APIs and optimize their performance, there are solutions available. In the procedural world, NobleNet's EZ-APIs, provide this framework. Visual Basic provides the framework in the GUI environment while OLE and CORBA2 provide solutions in the object world.

The first member of the EZ-API family, the OneDriver ODBC SDK, relocates the ODBC API from the Windows client to NT or to a wide variety of powerful UNIX platforms. The SDK includes all necessary communications software to connect Microsoft Windows 3.1, Win95, and NT clients to any standard TCP/IP server platform. OneDriver ODBC works with any ODBC-compliant database or front-end development tool including Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Delphi and Microsoft Access. As with all EZ-APIs, it easily integrates with other "Component APIs" and offers enhancement capability to developers.

"Five customers distributed the ODBC API on their own using our EZ-RPC compilers," said Steve Lemmo, founder and CEO of NobleNet. "Now, we'll do it for them. We're building a family of off-the- shelf industry-standard `Component APIs' designed to integrate with each other and with custom APIs, and to be enhanced by developers."

One customer that distributed the ODBC API using EZ-RPC is Aran Limited, of York, England. Aran manufactures the "SeaChange" Rapid Application Development (RAD) Environment that runs on top of a number of commercial databases. Aran needed to make data from any SeaChange database transparently available to any ODBC client.

According to Adrian Hornby, Aran's Development Manager: "We used EZ-RPC to develop an ODBC driver that transfers data transparently between ODBC clients and UNIX servers in a SeaChange environment.

"EZ-RPC allowed us to avoid coding any of the complex network communications software ourselves. Now with the OneDriver ODBC SDK, NobleNet has done most of the work that we had to do ourselves to distribute the ODBC driver. If we had known about the OneDriver ODBC SDK product, we definitely would have used it.

"From our perspective, the attraction of the OneDriver architecture is that it moves all of the ODBC API from the client to the server. Since NobleNet has already solved all of the networking issues involved with distributing a complex API like ODBC, using the OneDriver ODBC SDK would have made our lives much simpler and reduced our time-to-market."

"NobleNet EZ-APIs bring critical productivity improvements to distributed applications," said Dr. George Schussel, CEO and Founder of Digital Consulting, Inc. "Application developers can now deal with familiar API interfaces and not worry about how they will be distributed. EZ-APIs handle the distribution function in a completely transparent fashion. This provides a unique and valuable contribution to client/server computing."

In a related matter, NobleNet successfully demonstrated its OneDriver TSAPI SDK technology at Novell's Brainshare '96 Developers Conference. The demonstration will continue at the Client/Server and Database World Exposition in Boston. OneDriver TSAPI SDK is targeted at TSAPI systems integrators and PBX vendors building TSAPI-compliant drivers and applications and computer vendors that need TSAPI client and/or server capabilities.

Pricing and Availability

The NobleNet OneDriver ODBC SDK is available immediately and is priced at $2,500 per server for an unlimited number of users. Supported client platforms include Windows 3.1, Win95, and NT. Supported server platforms include NT, Sun Solaris, HP/UX, and IBM AIX. Ports to SCO and SGI will be available in 90 days. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can take advantage of NobleNet's reseller program which offers substantial discounts.

About NobleNet

NobleNet offers tools for distributed client/server development for procedural and object paradigms. Incorporated in 1991, NobleNet is a world leader in Remote Procedure Call (RPC) technology and has won numerous awards for its EZ-RPC product family. NobleNet also distributes IONA Technologies' industry-leading "Orbix" CORBA-compliant Object Request Broker. The company is headquartered in Southboro, Mass., and can be reached at 508/460-8222 or at http://www.noblenet.com.

CONTACT: NobleNet, Inc.

David Burns, 508/460-8222

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Pelorus Marketing Group

Joel Weinstein/Douglas McCartney, 508/620-5387

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