I didn't think so and I apologize if this is inappropriate for this forum, but it is about j2ee.
Toward the end of my college career, around 93-94, I was involved with Youngtown State's ACM chapter and we were all geeked about the web. I wasn't impressed with a lot of it, most people's pages were just reposts of pictures and links they stole from someone else. But we saw the potential and tried to get the university to do something useful with it. We played with CGI to get things like class catalogs and the like published, but mostly the university thought it was a nice toy and that we should leave stop bothering people. (Actually, we were used. The Computer Center saw this as the future, but knew they couldn't get it passed the administration. So they gave us just enough rope to hang ourelves, shouted about how dangerouslt we were representing the University and took it all alway without even a good job or pat on the back. The same people who encouraged and helped us from the CC, told us we were luck to not get in trouble)
Anyhow, After college (may of 95) I hooked up with a group of people working for Control Data in Detroit looking to develope a product to ease database access and integration through the web. The Info*Engine product started out as Perl scripts running in CGI, but quickly became a share object mounted on Nescape 2's NSAPI. The cool thing was ten years ago, we had these things called webjects that looked almost exactly like bean tags. We went to the first JavaOne and were doing things no one else were doing: accessing sql databases through web based tags, accessing and integrating with products like Metaphase (think ERP for the design side), we were in Ford, Motorola,GM, Boeing Roketdyne doing real ecommerce style applications. We had a layered protocol that allowed us to develop customized adapters. But mostly, we had fun and thought we were cool
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Netscape and HP flew in and saw our dog and pony show and talk about partner, but we didn't here back from either one and they each had their own competing product within 3-6 months (Netscape's was livewire). We spun off some time during all of this and started our own company and then got bought out by Parametric Technologies as an integration tool for their Windchill product. We eventual were absorbed into the product and ceased to exist as a stand alone product. Just as I was left the company, they were starting to embrace j2ee, which was the death knell for I*E, because they really were redundant and Windchill was fully invested in Java technologies...
In the end, I don't know if it was just coincidence or we really had some influence on beans and j2ee. I just thought you ought to know there were a group of us out there doing it first and our company remembered.
I now return your regularly scheduled forum
Jimbus