October 30, 2000

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Versant revs enJin for faster E-Business transactions

Vendor applies its object-oriented technology to help alleviate strain on infrastructures

By Rick Whiting

More on caching:

InternetWeek: Network infrastructure (10/9/00) TechWeb: CacheFlow to ship server accelerators (9/15/00) InternetWeek: Caching moves in two directions at once (8/21/00)

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s the volume of transactions over the Internet continues to grow, so does the strain on companies' E-commerce infrastructures. Versant Corp. will apply its object-oriented database technology to the problem next month when it begins shipping its enJin intelligent transaction caching platform for boosting the performance of Internet transaction systems.

The enJin system acts as a middleman between speedy application servers, on which many companies run their E-business applications, and back-end relational databases. Relational databases sometimes can't keep up with the volume of transactions produced by the E-business applications, resulting in a bottleneck that slows down the entire system. EnJin caches transaction data at peak load times and improves system performance by up to a factor of 50, according to the vendor.

Versant is aiming enJin toward markets that traditionally have applications with high transaction volumes, including financial services, communications, and transportation. Versant also hopes that EnJin will be used by application service providers and business-to-business exchanges.

Existing systems also require companies to develop code that maps transaction data produced by applications to the rows and columns in relational databases. Versant says enJin can reduce those development efforts by 40% or more. The enJin database also can be used to capture E-commerce transaction data for analysis and for Extensible Markup Language data interchange.

The enJin system is based on Versant's object-oriented database system. Although object-oriented databases have been around for more than a decade, they never caught on for mainstream computing applications. But the growth of E-commerce is giving vendors new uses for their technology. Earlier this year, Object Design Inc. morphed into Excelon Corp. and adapted its object-oriented database as a server-repository for XML data.

Versant's claims about speedier development are backed by Carl Schmidt, chief software architect at Kazootek Technologies Inc., which develops E-commerce applications. The Vancouver, British Columbia, company has been building Versant's object repository technology--now the core of enJin--into its software for several years. "We develop our applications on Versant's object-oriented database and save a ton of time," says Schmidt, noting that eliminating the need to map object data to relational databases cuts development time by 30%. "That was our primary goal in choosing it."

Kazootek is considering adopting the enJin product because of its replication functions and ability to process XML data. "Those would be useful to us," Schmidt says.

EnJin works with any Enterprise JavaBeans-compliant application server, including IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic software. The software will also support Sun Microsystems' iPlanet Webserver by year's end. In the near future, Versant plans to expand the product to support the Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 and Java messaging standards.

EnJin is scheduled to begin shipping on Nov. 15. Pricing for the standard edition will start at $24,995, while prices for the enterprise edition, which includes replication and synchronization capabilities, will begin at $29,995.

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