Hermosa Beach, CA -- January 4, 1999 -- Gefion software today announced the release of InstantOnline Basic 2.0, its standards based, cross-platform component suite for development of dynamic, interactive web sites.

"InstantOnline Basic 2.0 adds many advanced features to this popular product," said Hans Bergsten, President of Gefion software. "The new release is a result of a continuos dialog with our customers, adding the things they have told us would help them build web applications with even more features by simply combining powerful InstantOnline components."

InstantOnline Basic is a set of Java Servlet components for development of web applications. In addition to the database access and HTML presentation components in 1.0, InstantOnline Basic 2.0 adds components for file uploading and server-side file manipulation, dynamic web forms, sending email, input validation and user session data handling. Other improvements are extended variable handling, debug features and enhanced error handling.

Developing an application with InstantOnline Basic requires no coding, offering the same easy development model as proprietary server-side technologies like Microsoft's Active Server Pages and Allaire's Cold Fusion but with the advantage of running on all major platforms, including the popular Apache on Linux combination. InstantOnline Basic comes bundled with the InstantDB Java database and the LiteWebServer Java web server, preconfigured with demo applications to make it easy to get started.

Dynamic features, such as searchable product catalogs, discussion forums, and customization are becoming more and more popular as a way to add value for web site visitors. Nationsbanc Montgomery Securities LLC, as reported by Inter@ctive Week on June 25, 1998, predicts that the market for tools like InstantOnline will grow 37% annually from $145 million in 1997 to $700 million in 2001.

Thousands of people have downloaded and used InstantOnline Basic to date. "InstantOnline packages all the servlets needed to fully manipulate our databases and makes it easy to display the data in HTML format. To sum up our experience: InstantOnline is easy to use, FAST, and provides great technical support," says Tom O'Brien at Golf Link Inc.

Pricing and Availability

InstantOnline Basic 2.0, is available now in three versions:

• InstantOnline Basic 2.0 Evaluation
  free of charge, for non-commercial, evaluation use,
• InstantOnline Basic 2.0
  $249.00, for up to 50 users,
• InstantOnline Basic 2.0 Pro
  $499.00, for unlimited number of users.

For more information please visit http://www.gefionsoftware.com/InstantOnline/.

About Gefion software

Gefion software is a privately held company located in Hermosa Beach, California, founded in 1997. Gefion software develops products that simplify development of network based, platform independent applications.

With the company's focus on platform independent solutions, the Java language is the programming language of choice. All Gefion software products are developed in the Java programming language and use Java based technology to interface proprietary systems, such as JDBC for database access.

For more information about Gefion software and its products, please visit http://www.gefionsoftware.com/.

Gefion software, InstantOnline, InstantOnline Basic and LiteWebServer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Gefion software in the United States and other countries.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, Java, JDBC and JDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems Inc. in the United States and other countries.