SAN FRANCISCO, CA., May 9, 2000 - THOUGHT Inc., (www.thoughtinc.com) of San Francisco has announced the release and shipment of Version 3.1 of its CocoBase Enterprise O/R 3.1, the leading Object/Relational mapping tool. CocoBase Enterprise O/R 3.1 allows users to substantially cut costs for development of E-Commerce applications by dramatically reducing the amount of coding necessary to create the Enterprise JavaBeans that many e-commerce sites rely on. This 5th major upgrade of the product from the leader in object-oriented mapping technology for Enterprise JavaBeans delivers many new features for E- Commerce applications, including support of all of the leading servers, dynamic client side querying and dynamic mapping of tables. These new features add additional support companies needing to meet their return on investment (ROI) requirements for E-commerce solutions. Thought Inc.'s focus on cost savings, ease of development and broad base of industry support provides CocoBase customers like GTE Inc., AppNet Inc. and Perot Systems a major competitive advantage.

"As consultants specializing in application delivery, TRC has integrated the GemStone and CocoBase products very successfully on several large-scale projects," said John King, Director for The Technical Resource Connection (TRC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Perot Systems Corporation. "Packaging these two software products together is an excellent and timely decision. The strengths afforded to the developer by packaging these complementary products makes it an obvious winner."

One of the main features of CocoBase Enterprise O/R v3.1 is the ability to automatically generate all of the database access code from a map of the underlying data instead of writing the access by hand. This feature alone cuts the development time from around 40 hours to create a fully functional Entity Bean for EJB to Minutes! CocoBase provides tightly integrated Entity Bean support for Container Managed Persistence and Bean Managed Persistence that is portable across EJB Application Servers such as; BEA Weblogic 5.1, Gemstone/J, IBM's WebSphere, Inprise's Application Server, IONA's iPortal Server, iPlanet's (a Sun - Netscape Alliance) NAS Server, JONAS (open source) Application Server, Object Spaces' Voyager and Sybases' EA Server.

"Our integrations with the leading EJB Servers providing Entity bean support for both Container and Bean Managed Persistence, offers a complete development platform for Database Access with EJB applications. CocoBase Enterprise O/R delivers the most flexible, portable and customizable EJB Persistence on the market," said Ward Mullins, CTO of THOUGHT Inc.

Container Managed Persistence (CMP) allows developers to build EJB components without having to directly deal with persistence during development. While Bean Managed Persistence (BMP) requires that developers write a certain amount of persistence code. The use of CMP reduces the need for a developer to understand or to implement persistence code, which can dramatically speed up and simplify development. In contrast, the use of BMP makes it easier for the developer to edit and customize persistence code during development. While BMP delivers much needed flexibility to a developer, it also increases the complexity which CocoBase Enterprise O/R manages for you. With the use of CocoBase Enterprise O/R, the developer finds little difference in building applications using either CMP or BMP.

Other features that are important in this release are; 1) the ability to Dynamically Query from the client both regular Java and EJB applications through a QueryBuilder library. (which is included as source code.) 2) Dynamic Mapping of database tables so that in one step all of your tables can be mapped, thus saving time.

"Development, deployment and maintenance cost savings coupled with ease of use across EJB servers are what we deliver to customers who are building E-Commerce applications." said Dan Wilson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, THOUGHT Inc. "Our ability to work with virtually any EJB Server ensures that companies have the flexibility to meet ever changing requirements without losing ROI.


About CocoBase Enterprise O/R

CocoBase Enterprise O/R provides a powerful standard for bridging the fault between objects used by EJB Servers and RDBMS's. The CocoBase technology is based on landmark patents issued to THOUGHT Inc. for Repository based Object Mapping. It is the technology and product leader in the Java space. After 4 years of product acceptance and thousands of installation sites, CocoBase is in a class by itself in terms of Object to Relational Mapping. THOUGHT Inc. invented Repository based Object Mapping and then built a system on that technology that actually is more efficient than static solutions. This makes it an essential necessity for any Java Enterprise Component Developer.


About Thought Inc.

Established in 1993, THOUGHT Inc. is the market leader in Java-based object-oriented Mapping Middleware technology. THOUGHT Inc. has been shipping CocoBase, the companys' patented flagship product and the industry's most advanced framework for accessing legacy data in a distributed application since March of 1997. Since that time, THOUGHT Inc. founders have successfully provided solutions for customers deploying applications on the Worldwide Web and have gained a reputation for excellence with Object Mapping. CocoBase is a standards based product relying on such technologies as EJB, RMI, CORBA, JDBC, etc. Thought Inc. makes its home in San Francisco supporting customers worldwide in the United States, Europe, Japan, Asia and Australia. The CocoBase family of products are available through distributors, resellers and directly online at their Yahoo Store. CocoBase and THOUGHT Inc. are registered trademarks of THOUGHT Inc. CocoBase technology is based on US patent #5857197. More information on THOUGHT Inc. can be found online at www.thoughtinc.com.