(March 25, 2002) - Take the following ingredients: J2EE, XML, the former CEO of WebLogic, and two of his original seed investors...stir slowly. Call the resulting mix you get AltoWeb.

Palo Alto, California-based AltoWeb Inc--led by president and CEO Ali Kutay--focuses on easing J2EE development and moving it more into the mainstream. Since J2EE has a (richly deserved) reputation for complexity, this is an attractive value proposition for developers and organizations. Kutay's team knew that if they could come up with software that sits on top of J2EE-compliant app servers, it would be possible to help enterprise Java developers build and deploy e-business applications more quickly. Perhaps even ten times as fast!

The company's flagship product is the AltoWeb Application Platform and Kutay's claim is precisely this--that it enables companies to rapidly assemble, test, deploy, and manage e-business applications up to ten times faster than with their existing development resources.

How? By packaging application logic and tools that "streamline" assembly, testing, deployment, and management. Developers no longer have to wrestle, Kutay explains, with the complexities of writing low-level J2EE, XML, and Web services code.

It is this approach that leads AltoWeb to be announcing at JavaOne this week an alliance with fellow Java vendor Flashline Inc. By bringing together the AltoWeb Application Platform with the Flashline Component Manager, Enterprise Edition, what the two companies hope to provide developers with is a way of accessing reusable code and components (via the Component Manager) for redeployment in new Java apps via the AltoWeb Application Platform.

As befits a Web services player, AltoWeb became a community member of UDDI.org early on, formed to support the future development of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration standard. Says Kutay: "Commitment to open standards has been fundamental to the AltoWeb vision. With AltoWeb's 'Click to Publish' and 'Click to Use' approach to Web services, we're making UDDI more accessible and easier to use."