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Enhydra 3.5 for Wired and Wireless Devices Lutris Technologies www.lutris.corn $695 Development License $995 Deployment License (per CPU)
An Application Server with No Strings Attached
When the prerelease version of the latest incarnation of the Enhydra application server hit my desk, two questions came to mind: What's the "wireless" moniker doing in its name, and--because, after all, Enhydra is an open-source project--why do developers have to pay for it?
That last question turned out to be easy to answer. Lutris, the product's original developer, said goodbye to traditional licensing models in 1999, when it made the source to its product freely available, while continuing to generate revenue from support, training, and consultancy. So, while Enhydra is indeed fully open source and available for the cost of download from www.enhydra.org, Lutris Technologies also sells a commercially supported boxed version. Although I don't want to draw parallels between the stability or performance of the two products, you could say this is similar to the Mozilla/Netscape situation.
Which leaves the "why wireless" question. Of course, wireless is--and perhaps by the time you read this article was--the new magic word that any company interested in funding from the remaining VCs, and/or maintaining investor confidence, has to have somewhere in its business plan. But what does all this wireless hype really mean?
The most important functionality on a typical wireless feature list is that "almost every wireless markup language is supported." This sounds cool, but on closer examination it isn't very impressive. Because these markup languages tend to be based on either HTML or XML, the actual functionality required to support them is minimal.
Enhydra's feature list also mentions multiple markup language support. And true enough, it supports the functional equivalent of selecting different document object models (DOMs) to serve up XML-like data over TCP/IP. While this is useful in some situations, it's hardly exciting.
Server products that make wireless claims traditionally fail to integrate with the bearer systems that run the actual wireless network and that expose the final interface to the wireless subscriber. This isn't really surprising: Such systems are nonstandard and proprietary, and typically require integration efforts specific to a particular operator.
Enhydra Wireless is no exception. But having said that--and realizing that no generalpurpose application server...