The former Borland International--now known by the more sterile moniker Inprise Corporation--announced this week that it would be porting its tools and application servers to Sun's Solaris system, a UNIX derivative that runs primarily on Sun's own SPARC architecture. Inprise, which was a stalwart defender of Windows when it was known as Borland, made the announcement Monday, pledging to port Visual dBase, JBuilder, and AppCenter tools to Solaris. When that first step is complete, Inprise's remaining development tools, including Delphi and C++ Builder, will also be ported.
"Over the past year, we have been actively developing a comprehensive distributed object computing strategy," said Inprise CEO Del Yocam. "And the cornerstone of our strategy is the Inprise Application Server."
Indeed, Inprise is banking on the success of application servers: The company expects the business to become huge over the next year. Most of the future tools coming out of Inprise will be Java-based as well. The AppCenter client tools are all Java-based and a future version of Delphi will compile directly to Java byte-code