Let's start by getting the naming business out of the way! First there was a company named Borland. Then, for apparently no good reason, they changed their name to Inprise. The Inprise name was supposed to encompass the Enterprise products (such as VisiBroker, Entera, etc.) and the Borland name was kept for the tools (JBuilder, Delphi, C++Builder, etc.). Well, all the name change did was confuse everyone.
No, they weren't bought out. Yes, it's the same company, with the same developers. No, I don't know why they changed their name. Late last year the name experiment ended, and the name Borland now reigns supreme, referring to all the products made by the company Borland (formerly Inprise, formerly Borland). Now, is that straightened out?
The reason for the immediate digression into naming concerns the product I'm reviewing. This product started life many years ago as an application server for CORBA development. It featured excellent tools that made creating CORBA applications a breeze, writing much of the plumbing code for you. That was the Inprise Application Server, and it predated Java 2 Enterprise Edition. When J2EE became a reality, the product kept the same name but completely changed over to an EJB container (along with many other application server services). The Inprise app server existed until version 4.1. Now we have the Borland Application Server version 4.5, which I am about to officially review. The point of this history lesson is to indicate that this product is not a Johnny-come-lately to the application server market. It's based on solid technology and has been around awhile.
Installation is straightforward, running a standard InstallShield installer. Borland AppServer (BAS) installs not only the classes necessary for J2EE compliance, but VisiBroker as well. It was smart to build BAS around the VisiBroker core because VisiBroker is a well-established, rock-solid ORB. Why reinvent the wheel - and create a buggy wheel - when you already have proven code lying around? BAS installs the app server itself, which runs as a console application. It also installs the Borland AppServer console, which is the graphical management console. The BAS console is a Java Swing-based client that's very impressive.
It features a tree view on the left that shows all the pertinent running services, including different nodes for different app servers. This means you can manage multiple app servers from the same console. It also shows a great deal of information on the right-hand side about the artifact selected on the left (see Figure 1). This shows the status of a container- managed entity bean that's currently installed and available.
The console also serves as the deployment tool for EJBs. It offers wizards (real, functional wizards, not simple little apprentices) to deploy EJBs, generate JAR files for clients from existing EJBs (what a great idea), merge JARs together (another great idea), and migrate from an EJB 1.0 bean to an EJB 1.1 bean. This console is by far the best I've seen for an app server.
