Inprise Introduces DCE-CORBA Bridge

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September 15, 1998 (5:01 PM EDT)

By Andy Patrizio,

Inprise furthered its push into the high end of application-development tools Monday with DCE-CORBA Bridge, an interface that will allow access to a Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)-based network from CORBA applications.

DCE is a series of highly scalable, cross-platform protocols that go from Unix to virtual memory system to mainframes to Windows NT. However, though DCE in the past provided excellent security and supported a multitude of platforms, it was a difficult environment to program in. It also was designed before the Internet became a standard element in application development.

"The problem is if [companies] are going to CORBA, they have to throw away a lot of their applications or write their applications in a different way," said Paulus Weemaes, product manager for Entera products at Inprise, in Scotts Valley, Calif. "We want to make it possible to keep your old applications in DCE and connect those up to your CORBA clients."

CORBA's recent growth arises from its support of TCP/IP networks and the Internet, something DCE didn't have, but its security isn't as good. With Inprise DCE-CORBA Bridge, anyone working in a CORBA environment can access back-end DCE applications with no modifications needed to either the client or server software.

The growth of DCE has stalled in the past few years because of its lack of Internet support and difficult programming model, but it remains in many industries, particularly the financial sector. Inprise's Entera products are designed for easy building of applications in the otherwise esoteric DCE programming environment.

The bridge technology is bidirectional, but its primary design is for enabling a CORBA network to connect to legacy DCE applications, said Weemaes.

With technology gained from its acquisitions of Entera and Visigenic, which developed the VisiBroker CORBA technology, Inprise is well qualified to bring a badly needed product like DCE-CORBA Bridge to market, said Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Giga Information Group.

"I frequently encounter clients that have made large investments in DCE and need to make those interoperate with an Internet context," he said. Many applications written in large corporations in the past five years were done in DCE and need to latch on to emerging technologies like Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and public keys, which are supported in a browser.

Inprise will release DCE-CORBA Bridge at the end of October. The company did not disclose the price.