Day: May 9, 2000

Lutris Technologies Inc. announced the immediate availability of Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0. Priced at $99, it is a supported and certified version of the Open Source Java/XML application server. The combination of Open Source software and commercial support and services provides the control and flexibility of an Open Source solution, plus the security of commercial support, training, and documentation. Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0 provides an affordable option to corporate departments, small companies, consultants, and system integrators who have been priced out of the application server market and who have been unable to build high-end, data driven Internet applications that require the support of an application server. Several enhancements and improvements have been implemented in Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0, including full support for building wireless applications for delivery on cell phones and PDAs. A new feature, Enhydra Director, which distributes user loads across multiple servers, significantly increases the product’s scalability. Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0 is covered by the same Open Source licensing terms as the downloadable version, available at www.enhydra.org. Customers will continue to have complete access to source code, as well as the ability to deploy Enhydra applications with no licensing or royalty fees. Priced at $99, Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0 is available immediately for purchase from Lutris. Lutris’ customer support options are available to customers who purchase and register Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0. Registration entitles users to 15 days of free online installation support and access to the Lutris Knowledgebase. Customers may purchase incident-based support packages directly from Lutris online. Single-incident support is priced at $250 per-incident. Six- and 12-incident packages are also available for purchase, priced at $1,250 and $2,250, respectively. Customized support packages are also available. www.lutris.com

S.W.I.F.T. and FIX Protocol Limited (FPL) today announced that they are working with eight leading European Exchanges to define standards to harmonize access to the Pan European virtual blue chip market, planned to go live in November 2000. The European Exchanges who are involved include Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Madrid, Paris and Zurich. While the recent mergers between some of these exchanges may reduce the numbers of parties involved, their CEO’s are committed to supporting this initiative and explicitly endorse the FIX-S.W.I.F.T. collaboration. The initial output will be a Common Interface Specification for trade orders and notice of executions based on current FIX 4.2 Protocol specification. FPL is providing the technical expertise surrounding the business flows, whilst S.W.I.F.T. is providing their standard expertise and methodologies to facilitate and expedite the development process. All the business elements will be added to the ISO 15022 Data Field Dictionary, for which S.W.I.F.T. is the Registration Authority. Functionally equivalent S.W.I.F.T. messages will also be provided within the Common Interface Specification. Direct collaboration between S.W.I.F.T. and FPL will give rise to convergence and interoperability of message standards. The initiative will also result in the common deployment of the ISO 15022 Data Filed Dictionary, which will pave the way towards straight through processing as both protocols adopt XML. F.I.X., the Financial Information eXchange, is a messaging protocol, which is the de facto standard for pre trade and trade messaging in the global equity markets. FIX is administered by FIX Protocol Limited, whose members are exclusively drawn from the Investment Management and Broker Dealer communities globally. FPL is committed to promulgating standards in order to achieve the industry’s goal of Straight through processing. As part of this aim FPL has developed an XML grammar for FIX. www.swift.com

Basis Technology announced the release of its Chinese Morphological Analyzer (CMA), an accurate segmentation engine for search and retrieval of Chinese text. Chinese Morphological Analyzer combines dictionary-retrieval technology with syntactic analysis to yield accurate text segmentation results for both the simplified and traditional written forms of the language. CMA boasts a comprehensive online Chinese dictionary of nearly 1,000,000 headwords, incorporating phonological, lexical and grammatical attributes. This information is used by CMA algorithms to segment and accurately disambiguate Chinese text using contextual clues combined with syntactic analysis. Morphological analysis of the Chinese language is an inherently complex problem. Chinese is written without explicit word boundaries, and it lacks the script transition cues of Japanese and Korean scripts. Furthermore, each character can potentially function as an isolated word (free morpheme) or part of a compound word (bound morpheme) or phrase. For these reasons, maintaining online forms and databases, and facilitating effective search and retrieval, are particularly difficult in the Chinese language. Chinese Morphological Analyzer is written in portable ANSI C++ and has a pure Unicode (UCS2) internal architecture that handles every major Chinese encoding format. Chinese Morphological Analyzer is licensed as a royalty-free software development kit (SDK) or as a source code distribution on all major platforms, including Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital UNIX and Linux. www.basistech.com