ASIS is pleased to announce the release of BBj® 3.0. The product of an aggressive annual release schedule, this BBj release contains many significant enhancements.

BASIS customers all over the world are converting their existing applications to BBj without major difficulty, and they are discovering some exciting new possibilities along the way. Here is a rundown of the enhancements and features that BBj 3.0 offers:

• Increased speed and application performance. BASIS has changed the language token structure in 3.0, allowing expanded functionality as well as increased processing speed in the interpreter.

• Additional graphical user interface controls. Progress bars, popup menus, and tree controls are now available in 3.0, adding to the large list of controls already available in the resource file structure. It is now easier than ever to create powerful, eye-catching applications that conform to the latest GUI design standards.

• Improved administrative control. The BBj Enterprise Manager now facilitates the maintenance and monitoring of the complete BBj installation in real-time. Enhancements to the Enterprise Manager allow an administrator to view which data files are open on the server, list all currently running interpreter sessions, and edit the data dictionary structure. It is now possible to see exactly which users are running which programs, and more important, which programs have certain files OPENed, LOCKed, or have records EXTRACTed. The BBj 3.0 Enterprise Manager makes it possible to monitor external application users connecting through ODBC and JDBC. It is also possible to terminate long queries, without halting the server on which they were running.

• The Multiple Document Interface (MDI) user interface. Multiple distinct BBj programs ("documents") can now operate inside a single graphical window on the desktop, just as several floating documents might appear inside the working area of a single word processor or spreadsheet application. When the single MDI window is minimized, maximized, restored, or resized, the individual application windows go with it. Only one icon appears on the taskbar.

• Data sharing with InterProcess Communication. Applications often need to share information between themselves or their users. This can be accomplished by creating new socket connections, or by writing out temporary files to disk, or by using other even more complicated schemes. BBj 3.0 has a new object, BBjNamespace, which makes data sharing between BBj programs simple and easy to implement. Any BBj programs running within the same JVM can dynamically exchange data on a global, group, or private level. Furthermore, changes made to BBjNamespace objects can trigger events in any program, including thin client users operating remotely from the central server.

• Web services support. This exciting new technology, available in BBj 3.0, makes it possible for applications on different platforms to communicate with each other via the Web. In the Web services paradigm, applications cooperate by using a standard message architecture to pass information. Data and services can then be successfully exchanged, even though the applications themselves are written in different languages and run on different networks. BBj Web services support allows BBj applications to become players in this bold new world, and BBj developers to salvage existing applications that are becoming dangerously isolated or irrelevant.