Enterprises can now master the challenge of electronic business through a new approach for enterprises to create Internet-based business (IB2) applications and to deploy them on the universal Java platform. Software AG partner in South Africa, SPL, has announced Bolero, a new Business Application Factory, which enables applications to support Internet and Web technology and to seamlessly integrate existing applications and ERP packages. According to Schalk Viljoen, SPL`S Software AG business manager, enterprises are facing a complex variety of disparate IT systems which have to be seamlessly integrated and extended with new components, including the Web-enablement of existing applications and integration of standard solutions. Viljoen explains that it has become necessary for companies to extend their business activities electronically across their borders, not only to connect with business partners, but to offer network-based services to customers and suppliers. "Bolero offers a significant reduction of complexity and provides optimum investment protection by integration of existing and future commercial applications into a new quality of an object-oriented enterprise IT framework," he says. "Software AG has decided to use the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as platform for Bolero in order to assure maximum cross-platform portability and scalability." For the professional production of mission-critical applications, Bolero offers design patterns for the highest possible productivity, a component repository to ease the reuse of components, and specific data types for commercial calculations and multi-currency support. Bolero is targeted at corporations and software vendors implementing mission-critical IB2 applications, who need integration with existing applications and standard packages. It is designed particularly for the creation of server-based applications. "To develop IB2 applications, a mechanism must be provided to execute complex enterprise-wide transactions. Existing object technology offers no simple solution for this. In Bolero, `long transactions` can be specified for this purpose and rules are used to specify their flow control, the conditions for their rollback and the set up of compensating actions," says Viljoen. "Bolero has the potential to become the de facto industry standard for the creation and integration of large-scale applications," says Dr. Helmut Wilke, member of the board of Software AG. "It represents a major technology breakthrough. Being our biggest product initiative in this decade, it will be backed by worldwide rollout activities. We invite enterprises, software producers, vendors of ERP packages and systems integrators to apply Bolero to increase their productivity and improve their own business success." Bolero users can specify the object model of choice - either DCOM or Java Beans - for their components simply by setting class attributes. In future versions, Bolero will also support Corba`s IIOP (DCOM: Distributed Component Object Model; IIOP: Internet Inter Orb Protocol; Corba: Common Object Request Broker Architecture). Other features of Bolero include: * Persistent storage of objects in relational databases (object-relational mapping); * Syntax check for Object Query Language statements (OQL is a subset of the SQL3 standard) at compile time, which avoids data access errors at runtime; * Generation of Java Byte Code by the Bolero compiler (corresponds to Java Developer`s Kit Version 1.2; * Integration of Java class libraries; * The option of DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), Java Beans or RMI (Remote Method Invocation) as application integration method; and * A tool for programming graphical user interfaces (GUI).
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