06/22/2004

IONA Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), the provider of integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, says its Artix and Orbix Connect products can easily expose legacy and other non-Java systems and applications for use in new J2EE programming initiatives.

IONA offered these details:

Artix delivers a proven platform-independent and standards-compliant infrastructure for building enterprise Web services and achieving service-oriented integration. Organizations that have adopted J2EE but still have considerable investments in mainframe, CORBA„¥ and other legacy technologies, can use Artix to seamlessly link JMS to other transports such as MQ, TIBCO, Tuxedo and others, bringing together these disparate systems into a cost-effective, efficient computing environment. Because Artix includes native support for JMS and JAX-RPC, and automatically generates Java client stubs and server skeletons from WSDL, developers can be certain that the new J2EE applications they are building and maintaining can easily incorporate the multiple systems and applications exposed by Artix.

"The increasing support for SOA as an accepted computing methodology at the enterprise level has forced companies to reevaluate the role their previous technology investments will play in new strategic initiatives," said Scott Devens, vice president of products, IONA. "Over the past few years, more and more organizations have turned to J2EE to support new application development and now IONA is making it even easier to incorporate these J2EE applications into service-oriented projects."

IONA's Orbix Connect is designed for use by J2EE developers that need to access and integrate their companies' CORBA investments for use in new applications. Orbix Connect enables direct bridging of J2EE and CORBA resources, and transparent access to CORBA applications from any standard J2EE IDE. Because Orbix Connect enables the embedding of CORBA capabilities within a JCA resource adaptor, connectivity, security and transaction management are transparent and natural for J2EE developers to accomplish without requiring any CORBA programming knowledge or experience. Using Orbix Connect, Java developers can focus their attention away from underlying connectivity and service management issues and instead focus on business logic.

"IONA is showing that it truly understands the connectivity and integration issues that face many of today's most forward-thinking companies," said Bob Bickel, vice president of strategy and corporate development, JBoss. "There is no question that organizations are building J2EE applications and will continue to do so for some time. The question is how will these organizations use their J2EE investments, along with other technologies, as the foundation for a successful SOA strategy. IONA is showing these companies at least one way to answer that question."