IBM Extends Pioneering San Francisco Java Business Components
Developers Can Now Quickly Build Order Processing and Warehouse Management Applications
SAN FRANCISCO (March 24, 1998) – Today at the JavaOne** Worldwide Developer Conference, IBM announced the second release of the IBM San Francisco* Java** business process components, which will provide developers with the framework to rapidly build order processing and warehouse/inventory management applications.
The company also announced IBM San Francisco Technology Centers around the world where programmers and project leaders can learn more about the benefits of using Java frameworks to speed application development. In addition, Visient Corporation and Select Software Tools announced integrated tool suites for San Francisco, joining a growing list of software tools vendors working to make it easier to build and maintain San Francisco applications.
San Francisco provides developers with business process components to more quickly create customizable, server-side applications. It is the largest server-side Java initiative in the industry, and with this release roughly 500,000 lines of code will be in the hands of developers. San Francisco is part of IBM’s commitment to provide Java tools, technologies and solutions to enable customers, business partners and developers to capitalize on the benefits of network computing and e-business.
The New Frameworks
The San Francisco Warehouse Management components can be used by developers to create line-of-business applications that handle such processes as quality control, sourcing, stock picking, planning, shipping and receiving, lot numbers, replenishment and back order handling.
The new Order Management framework is designed to help create applications that support a variety of sales and purchase order types, invoicing, custom pricing and discounting. It fully integrates with the Warehouse Management framework, which enables developers to integrate their inventory and warehouse operations directly with their sales and invoicing functions, delivering “big business” efficiencies to small and growing organizations.
In addition, the new release of San Francisco provides developers with national language support, more sample JavaBeans**, performance enhancements to the Foundation layer, a framework for building graphical user interfaces to San Francisco-built applications, and support for additional deployment platforms and data formats. These enhancements also apply to the existing San Francisco General Ledger framework and San Francisco business objects, which were released in August 1997.
IBM San Francisco Technology Centers
To assist developers in growing accustomed to working with application frameworks and business process components, IBM has created new San Francisco Technology Centers and is providing San Francisco specialists in selected IBM Solution Partnership Centers around the world. San Francisco-specific technology centers are being introduced in Austin, Texas, LaHulpe, Belgium, and Tokyo, Japan.
IBM’s existing Solution Partnership Centers in Waltham, Mass.; San Mateo, Calif.; Hursley, England; Sydney, Australia; and Ehningen, Germany, have dedicated staff specializing in San Francisco application development to train and assist developers who license the code.
General Availability and New Feature Information
The new business application frameworks are expected to be commercially available in the second quarter. National language functions have been extended to support French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish in the runtime environment of San Francisco-built applications.
IBM San Francisco business process components are available on the IBM OS/400* and AIX* platforms, and the Windows NT** platform.
Later this year, IBM plans to announce the availability of Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable Core Business Process, additional platform support including Sun Solaris** and HP-UX**, and dual currency support for Euro currency.
In addition, IBM plans to provide a migration path to Enterprise JavaBeans** for developers who are building applications using IBM’s San Francisco* business components. The migration path is designed to enable San Francisco components such as general ledger and order management to run on top of Enterprise JavaBeans-enabled middleware.
Source: IBM