Another company making good use of acquired technology, Borland today announced the general availability of its VisiBroker 3.2. New to 3.2 is improved performance and usability. For example, the ne w ORB will invoke remote servers 20 to 40 percent faster than before. At JavaOne this week, Persistence Software intends to introduce PowerTier for Enterprise JavaBeans. This Object Oriented application server can tie client, server, and database together with mere method calls-no glue, no embedded SQL statements.
Developers simply reference database data as simple arrays of objects.
Offered as a standard extension to the JDK, JAF will help developers build JavaBeans components that can determine the identity of arbitrary pieces of data. For example, a JAF-enabled JavaBeans component could determine that a piece of data is JPG or GIF and load that data using the appropriate graphics handling code. Microsoft and Apple forge Java VM ties. Many people predicted that Microsoft's financial support of Apple's efforts with Java would lead to this. News compiled by Bradley F. Shimmin .