JBoss Group LLC will release the developer version of an upgrade to its open source Java application this month, employing a programming model that it says should make life easier for developers creating Web applications for large enterprises. Called aspect-oriented programming (AOP), the model was developed about a decade ago at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), said Marc Fleury, founder and CEO of JBoss Group. Its use in JBoss 4.0 should make it easier for developers to build applications that include functions important for enterprises such as object persistence, caching and replication, he said.
JBoss competes with commercial application servers from BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others. JBoss Group makes money selling services and documentation around the open source product. Its product has proved a popular development platform and the company hopes to expand its use in production environments at large businesses.
Visio branded as enterprise-ready
Microsoft Corp. this month unveiled a new version of its Visio diagramming tool that aims to enable corporate users to take better advantage of traditional Office desktop applications and also connect desktop users with server-based line-of-business data. The newly named Microsoft Office Visio 2003, which will be a more integral part of Microsoft’s Office System, will be aimed not just at the product’s core technical users but at IT professionals and business users looking to use data more effectively and reduce the “manual labour” involved in pulling together information from multiple sources.
Microsoft has four goals with Visio 2003, according to a company spokesperson, including getting customers to use it more as a smart client in order to consume and deliver Web services, as a process management tool that can quickly document and map out how users conduct business, to better leverage a number of IT assets and investments, and to achieve greater worker productivity.
