Iona adds final pieces to e-business platform
Iona Technologies on Monday introduced what it is calling the finishing touches
to its e-business platform, at the company's Iona World 2001 annual user conference
in Orlando, Fla.
Dublin, Ireland-based Iona took advantage of its user group as a canvas to
introduce an integration environment and a toolkit for building Web services.
"With these products we've pretty much rounded out the e-business platform
we've been talking about," said Don Roedner, Iona's director of product
marketing.
The two new products are iPortal Integrator and iPortal XMLBus.
Iona refers to iPortal Integrator as a J2EE and XML-based enterprise integration
environment that can be used to integrate and automate internal systems and
processes. Further, the integrator can be used to expose internal systems to
partners, suppliers, and customers.
The other product Iona announced Monday is iPortal XMLBus, a technology preview
of an XML-based toolkit that can be used to build and deliver Web services,
according to Rebecca Dias, Iona's product manager for iPortal XMLBus.
By supporting the de facto Web services standards, XML, SOAP (Simple Object
Access Protocol), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), and
WSDL (Web Services Description Language), the development environment allows
developers to expose their infrastructures to partners as well as to access
partners' Web services-enabled applications, according to the company.
Furthering its reach, iPortal XMLBus supports Iona's own iPortal Application
Server, Version 1.3 and BEA Weblogic, Version 6.
Analysts said that the application server stack is becoming increasingly important
as companies move toward a Web services architecture.
"Web services is the technology that allows the Internet to be a programmable
medium," said Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Giga Information Group, headquartered
in Cambridge, Mass.
Gilpin continued, however, that although application server stacks garner quite
a bit of attention as enablers of Web services, there are other uses for them,
including for mobile, call center, and Web infrastructures.
While Iona built these latest pieces itself, the company picked up other technologies
along the way, including business-to-business integration from the February
acquisition of Netfish Technologies. Dias said that the Netfish acquisition
will most likely close at the end of May.
Although Iona is saying the foundation pieces of the e-business platform are
all in place, it will continue to evolve.
"Over time, we will put more and more into the app server," Dias
said, including security and integration with XML interfaces.
The XMLBus Technology Preview is available for download at: www.xmlbus.com.
InfoWorld
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