FRAMINGHAM (11-10-95) - BM is adding World-Wide Web support to its VisualAge application development tool set as part of an ambitious plan to marry the graphical forms found on Web servers with back-end corporate data and applications.
The enhancements will let developers build applications with front ends based on HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) rather than OS/2 Presentation Manager or Windows, said David Fallside, the IBM programmer heading up the project.
Those front ends will then be able to tap into databases or other applications encapsulated in VisualAge wrappers at the server, creating a Web-based client/server application.
A future release of VisualAge, first for Smalltalk and then for C++, will introduce a folder of HTML Web parts. Developers will click on the folder, drag and drop HTML parts onto their editing screen, and create a graphical user interface that runs on a Web server and is accessed when a user connects with the server through a Web browser. IBM expects to begin beta-testing the VisualAge Web extensions around year-end, with a release planned for later in 1996.
IBM's approach in VisualAge, which is a set of visual tools and team programming features layered on top of different procedural languages, is different from that of Java, a Web development tool from Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.
"Java is aimed at the client side, not the server side of the application," Fallside said.
Security will be supported in two ways. One is via the secure Web protocol used by a browser like Netscape, which, in effect, makes the transmission between client and server safe.
Secondly, IBM will support the Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol protocol, which will let developers add to the VisualAge palette a set of secure objects that can be used in applications.
In related news, IBM's link between DB2 and the Web is almost ready. The software is now in the late beta-test phase. It will let users click on buttons within a Web form to access DB2 data on a back-end server.
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