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BEA's Iceberg to manage millions of objects
http://www.pcweek.com/news/0421/23abea.html
BEA Systems Inc. is marrying its TP middleware with object-oriented
technologies to create an enterprise infrastructure for managing
millions of objects.
Code-named Iceberg, the new product is due next year, and will
integrate BEA's Tuxedo suite of transaction processing middleware with
ORB (Object Request Broker) and Message Que products BEA acquired from
Digital Equipment Corp. earlier this year.
Tuxedo controls the flow of commercial transactions, such as making a
reservation or exchanging funds, over heterogeneous networks. BEA
bought the Digital products "because we needed an environment to run
objects and let them communicate between themselves," said Geri
Edwards, vice president of strategy and product planning for BEA, in
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Tuxedo will interoperate with the BEA ORB and BEA Message Que products
this year. Further integration through Iceberg will follow next year,
Edwards said.
BEA's Iceberg will provide a stable infrastructure for managing
millions of object transactions from start to finish, as well as
connections between objects and clients.
Iceberg will merge the run-time environment and management interface
of Tuxedo with the programming environment of the ORB and interobject
communication capabilities of Message Que into a single
infrastructure.
Iceberg also will feature a single management console that will
support multiple programming models, including Java and CORBA (Common
Object Request Broker Architecture). The CORBA Internet Inter-ORB
Protocol will be the standard communication protocol.
BEA will deliver an Iceberg software development kit this year
consisting of an ORB, Tuxedo transaction services and a framework of
objects that developers can put into their applications so they will
operate in the Iceberg infrastructure.
BEA also will deliver enterprise JavaBeans to create the component
architecture for Java-based Iceberg next year.
For large enterprise users, object-oriented computing is a challenge
because mission-critical applications have millions of objects, not
hundreds.
A bank, for example, can have different objects for savings and
checking accounts, and around five or six objects for each customer.
"It's a great idea," said Morrie Segal, technology director for FDC
Technologies, in Bethesda, Md. "We need to be at the point where we
can assemble full applications across networks by utilizing reusable
functions."
Pricing for the new products was not available.