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Caching query connections used to be the sign of a sophisticated Web-to-database connectivity package. But today, pulling tabular data and dumping it on an HTML page is no longer good enough. Increasingly ambitious intranet applications require robust solutions that integrate with older transactional systems and newer distributed object technologies.

NetDynamics 4.0 gives you everything you would expect and more. It gives you RDBMS connectivity--and gives you out-of-the-box connectivity to PeopleSoft and SAP R/3. It gives you caching of database connections--and gives you dynamically load-balanced servers with failure detection and restart. It gives you HTML output and state and session management--and gives you an open component-based framework that makes it easy to adapt other platforms.

Many vendor solutions offer similar features but we found NetDynamics uses CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) to strike the best balance between flexibility and performance.

Cold Fusion 3.1 from Allaire Corp. is one of our favorites in this category because of its straightforward effectiveness. Although Bluestone Software's Sapphire/Web has a more difficult learning curve, its functionality earns it an honorable mention.

Net-Dynamics 4.0, $895 to $14,000,
Net-Dynamics,
(650) 462-7600.
www.netdynamics.com