AppWorx Updates Java-Based Job Scheduler

Published: April 18, 2006

by Alex Woodie

AppWorx last week unveiled AppWorx version 7, a new release of its flagship job scheduling tool for OS/400, Unix, Linux, Windows, and OpenVMS platforms. With this release, the Bellevue, Washington, company is prepping its product for life in a world connected by Web services technology.

It's been almost a year since AppWorx first introduced support for OS/400 with version 6.1 of its product (see "AppWorx Brings Job Scheduler to OS/400"). Since that time, the company reported record revenue for 2005, and although its doubtful its introduction to the OS/400 market was responsible for that feat, it does speak positively of AppWorx's product and development approach, which eschews the traditional script-based control in favor of an object-oriented design that sits above the applications, thereby making it "application aware" and capable of reacting to error codes, according to the company.

With version 7, the company is boosting the product's use of standards, including using XML and SOAP for inter-application communication, JDBC for tapping into databases, and SSL for protecting the data. All components of AppWorx 7.0, including the master, agent, and client components, are written entirely in Java now. The company is also using Java Messaging Service (JMS) with this release, and supports multi-threading to speed processing.