JavaSoft's Enterprise JavaBeans were designed to help software developers build business logic into transaction-aware applications. One user likened the arrival of JavaSoft's Platform for the Enterprise to the implementation of the production line at the Ford Motor Co. earlier this century.

"This means that you can have some sections of your company working on, let's say, security beans or business logic beans," said Rajesh Lalwani, president of Baseline Concepts, Inc., a World Wide Web task automation company in Cupertino, Calif. "This enables you to treat these issues as black box issues."

Also at Internet World, JavaSoft will announce features of its Java Transaction Server, which is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), according to Sharada Achanta, JavaSoft's product line manager for Enterprise Java. "We have taken CORBA's Object Transaction Server and built a Java binder."

The specification for Glasgow will be frozen during the next 30 to 60 days, according to JavaSoft officials. "JavaSoft is really targeting the independent software developer rather than corporate developers with this software," said Evan Quinn, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Mountain View, Calif.

Not all independent software vendors, however, are convinced that the Platform for the Enterprise is ready for business-level applications. "Our strategy is to move all our software on to ActiveX first," said Terry Golesworthy, president of Boston-based terminal-emulation company Software Development, Inc. "We think that JavaSoft is about six to nine months away from delivering software that we can base our business on. So at that time we will bring our software over from ActiveX to Java."

JavaSoft is slated to formally launch its Java Foundation Classes today, officials said. The foundation classes are a set of application programming interfaces made from Netscape Communications Corp.'s Internet Foundation Class, JavaSoft's Abstract Windowing Toolkit and IBM Java technology. Java Foundation Classes will be delivered in three installments, giving developers a lightweight user interface with features such as event queuing, components such as tree views and additional server functions, according to Eric Chu, product marketing manager of the Java Development Kit.