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SAS Institute announced the first Java thin-client development suite for information delivery SAS Institute, the market leader in information delivery software, has announced the first Java thin-client development suite to be tailored specifically to the information delivery environment. AppDev Studio, which massively reduces development time, will extend information delivery capabilities through its Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and re-useable Java components known as Information Delivery Java Beans. "We’re delivering on the promise of Java for information delivery" says Allan Russell, Vice President of Strategy at SAS Institute’s Europe, Middle East and Africa headquarters. "Our Java IDE is the first to allow organisations to develop Java applications that add on to, rather than replace, their existing information delivery development. Not only does that reduce development time by minimising the amount of Java coding, it also offers organisations reduced risk in their Java applications development by matching the client-side potential of Java with SAS Institute’s mature server-side environment, which is specifically tuned for information delivery applications from multiple data sources." AppDev Studio reduces development effort in three ways. Firstly, Java IDE (called webAF� ) contains beans that package existing SAS� software functionality and communication to the server. Secondly, developers can package existing SAS development work as Java Beans and incorporate these into thin-client applications. Thirdly, developers can use Information Delivery Java Beans that are tailored to specific types of analyses. The first of these (called webEIS� ) are OLAP-viewer Beans that allow business analysts to view and navigate data stored in OLAP cubes, from within a browser. Developers can also incorporate third party Java Beans. GAN Insurance in the UK has used SAS software to develop a data warehouse, which is used by its underwriters to monitor business performance and to focus on profitability. GAN is now using AppDev Studio to extend the data warehouse front-end to more varied types of users via thin-client applications. "Our biggest problem is presenting data so that users can understand it," says Paul Wheeler, senior analyst programmer at GAN. "AppDev Studio will allow us to deliver functionality to the widest possible audience." Development of the thin-client interface to the warehouse took just six weeks. Wheeler estimates that development time would have been twice as long with any other IDE. "We would have had to spend a lot of time writing the interface between SAS software and Java, whereas in webAF it’s already there."