VisiBroker 3.2 Offers Enhanced Performance and Usability

March 23, 1998 Borland International, Inc. today announced the general availability of VisiBroker 3.2, Borland's industry-leading CORBA-compliant ORB for building, deploying and managing distributed Java and C++ applications. With this release, Borland continues to upgrade the overall enterprise computing capabilities introduced last summer by Visigenic Software with the initial VisiBroker 3.0 release. Major enhancements in version 3.2 extend the ORB's performance, usability and customisation capabilities, furthering the standard for developer productivity and building enterprise distributed object applications.

VisiBroker 3.2 supports Borland's philosophy of providing a powerful development environment with great usability. As a result, by extending the enterprise computing capabilities of VisiBroker, enhanced development efforts were focused on performance, scalability, usability and customisation.

Highlights of VisiBroker 3.2 include:

Improved Performance and Scalability

• Connection management for building scalable distributed applications have been further optimised, resulting in improved performance and support for a larger number of users. In particular, performance for VisiBroker for Java 3.2 has been significantly improved, resulting in 20 to 40 percent faster invocations of remote servers compared to previous versions.
• The use of the object wrapper feature will also improve performance as its ability to cache information locally on the client or the server eliminates the need for subsequent remote access to the server or database.
• Enhancements have been made to improve proxy performance for Internet- based distributed applications. VisiBroker Gatekeeper, a key component of these solutions, enables Java applets running under a client browser to communicate to server objects on multiple hosts via the standard ORB protocol, IIOP, or the web HTTP protocol.

Enhanced Usability

• A graphical configuration tool for the VisiBroker Gatekeeper allows users to easily customise Gatekeeper for their environment, supporting multiple options.
• Support for the ``Dynamic Any'' feature of the CORBA portability specification improves developers' productivity in building dynamic programs where the interfaces are not known until runtime. Dynamic programs are valuable when building applications that take advantage of dynamic clients, such as scripting languages or browsers.
• A revised Interface Definition Language (IDL) compiler provides more comprehensive error messaging information, increasing developers' productivity.
• Updated installation routines give developers even greater flexibility for getting started with VisiBroker, such as the providing a single integrated installation of the naming and event service with the ORB rather than separate installations.

Greater Customisation

• Object wrappers allow developers to customise their application by defining methods that are executed when communicating with objects on the server. Requests can be intercepted at both the client and server, allowing for greater flexibility and improved performance. For example, object wrappers can be used to cache information on both the client and server, when a request for the same information from a database is repeated. The client or server are then notified and the cache is used to eliminate the need for the actual operation.
• Applications can be written to take advantage of a new API that allows for administration at runtime. For example, this can change connection and thread parameters based upon results from queries made in the program.

Borland's VisiBroker -- The Leading Deployed ORB Technology

• Borland was the first company to release a Java ORB and the first to support IIOP in its ORB products. The company was also the first ORB vendor to implement a new CORBA standard for Java interoperability. Deployed licenses for Borland's VisiBroker ORB surpassed 30 million in 1997, making VisiBroker the most widely distributed and adopted ORB worldwide. Industry partnerships with Oracle, Hitachi, Novell, Netscape, Informix, Silicon Graphics and others have played a key role in making VisiBroker the leading deployed ORB in the computer industry. Recently, Borland's VisiBroker won DBMS Magazine's 1997 Readers' Choice Award for best Object Request Broker.

• Borland's VisiBroker ORB technology is designed to facilitate the development and deployment of distributed object-based applications that are scaleable, flexible and easily maintainable. VisiBroker allows organisations to leverage existing corporate applications while developing and deploying new distributed applications. VisiBroker for Java and VisiBroker for C++ implement the CORBA 2.0 and IIOP standards developed by the Object Management Group (OMG), and can interoperate with other CORBA-2.0 compliant ORBs in a distributed object computing environment.

Platforms and Availability

VisiBroker 3.2 for Java is immediately available on all major JDK 1.1 platforms, including Windows 95 and NT, Solaris 2.5 and 2.6, HP UX, AIX, Digital Unix, and SGI Irix. VisiBroker 3.2 for C++ is immediately available on Solaris and Windows 95 and NT, with other Unix platforms planned for next quarter.

Borland - www.borland.com