Mix Droplets With GLUE For Instant Web Services

Combined technologies from application platform pioneer Droplets, and GLUE inventor, The Mind Electric, allows cross platform, rich GUI applications to instantly access Web Services

NEW YORK, March 26, 2002 - Droplets, Inc. today announced a strategic alliance with Addison, Texas-based The Mind Electric, Inc. (TME) to provide an innovative solution for deploying high usability, real-time applications which access Web Services with very little additional programming. Droplets will offer GLUE as a development option within its platform for enterprises who need a rapid deployment option for Web Services.

Droplets brings more robust usability and simplified deployment by enabling intelligent applications to be administered from a central server, over thin bandwidth connections, and accessed from a desktop icon, wireless device or portal Web top. GLUE simplifies and unifies traditional distributed computing with the emerging Web Services, and is based on open standards including XML, HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and WAP. GLUE Professional includes enterprise-level features such as EJB integration, JMS integration and UDDI server.

How Droplets and GLUE help customers:
The Droplets platform and GLUE were implemented together recently when Droplets, Inc. assisted a Fortune 500 manufacturing company with the building of a front-end interface to a Web Service written in .Net. Currently deployed as a Web page, the customer required a more interactive user interface and real time responsiveness, while maintaining the administrative benefits of a server-side architecture.

"We had never used GLUE before, but the buzz in the development community was that it made Web Services trivial to access in Java," said Louis Franco, chief architect at Droplets, Inc. "Working on site, we downloaded GLUE, followed the installation instructions, and pointed it to the WSDL URL that was given. Three minutes later we had a simple program accessing the Web Service. GLUE even dealt with the fact that the .NET-generated WSDL didn't describe the return value, by providing a JAXP compliant XML parser. Within a few hours, they had a production quality application, written in Java, sourcing a .Net Web Service, running from their Droplets server."

"With Droplets, you don't forfeit functionality when moving to the Net, and that is a unique proposition for server-side applications," said Graham Glass, founder of The Mind Electric. "We're thrilled to offer customers GLUE with Droplets to make highly interactive Web Services fast and easy to implement."

About The Mind Electric
Founded in February 2001 by well-known Java authority and author Graham Glaas, The Mind Electric, Inc. (TME) is a software infrastructure vendor whose mission is to create the best platform for service oriented architectures. TME provides an innovative and easy-to-use web services platform for building and deploying enterprise-class distributed applications. Customers include Bank of America, Storage Networks, Hitachi, Healthnet, General Dynamics, Qwest and Nippon Steel. For more information, visit www.themindelectric.com.

About Droplets
Founded in May 2000 and headquartered in New York City, Droplets, Inc. provides an application platform and standards-based Java and C++ development tools for deploying highly interactive, real-time applications. The Droplets platform provides the full GUI capabilities of fat client software, directly from the desktop or through a Web browser, while maintaining all application code on your servers. Droplets provides significant bandwidth savings over Web-based applications, while increasing end-user productivity, customer intimacy and partner loyalty. Strategic partners include Borland, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Sun Microsystems. Visit www.droplets.com .

Legal notice: Droplets, User Interface Server, Dripline, Universal User Interface and the Droplets logo are trademarks of Droplet, Inc. All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
© 2002 Droplet, Inc. All rights reserved.