Oracle this week will ship its new Web Developer Suite, which includes a new NCA Cartridge SDK (software development kit). Other pieces of the suite include mature products such as Oracle's Designer/2000, Developer/2000, Oracle Web Application Server, Oracle 7 Enterprise Server and Oracle InterOffice collaboration software, but users say the new NCA support is crucial.

"The idea of the NCA cartridge architecture is important because it will let users create components or cartridges and will let users reuse them across different applications," said one Oracle user, Barry Johnson, president of Dynamic Information Systems, a system integrator company in Minneapolis. "It also gives you the benefits of CORBA [Common Object Request Broker Architecture] but with much less complexity."

The NCA SDK is composed of a set of cartridges for migrating Common Gateway Interface applications to Oracle NCA cartridges, which are essentially containers for objects or software components. NCA cartridges can then be plugged into clients, application servers or database servers, officials said.

Analysts assert that without the right tools, the much-ballyhooed NCA may not find a stronghold within corporate IT.

"You need to have tools if people are going to adopt NCA," said Evan Quinn, an analyst with International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass., who points to the Web Developer Suite's attractive pricing ($1,495 for ISVs and VARs) as a potential big draw for new developers. "It's very early to tell if NCA will take off. There may be a demand in the long term, but companies will not be running to it overnight."

Oracle also has plans to incorporate new middleware into future versions of Web Developer Suite, said Oracle officials. Expected in the next version of the Web Developer Suite is the much-awaited Sedona development environment.

Sedona would let developers mix and match object standards, such as OLE and CORBA, in order to construct object relationships. It also would enable developers to manage objects better through a logical repository, said officials.

Sedona, while originally slated for completion in the third quarter of 1996, will roll out with Oracle8, slated for shipment in the spring, according to Oracle officials.

Oracle Web Developer Suite will initially support Solaris and Windows NT. Unix operating systems from IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Digital Equipment Corp. will be supported next month.

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