Columbus, GA - Commonplace among our nation's community of educators is an overwhelming attraction toward Apple/Macintosh technology. For the MEA Federal Credit Union, serving the financial needs of educators from across the greater Columbus, Georgia and Phenix City, Alabama region, such an attraction comes as no exception. "Upon learning that the current version of JUICE would indeed run on Apple's OS X, I was ecstatic. For years I have managed our systems using my personal notebook computer, now upgraded to a first generation MacBook Pro, and have four other Mac users in our organization. Although various terminal emulators were available, these did not provide the ease of use I needed for most of my users. With JUICE, I can now migrate more users to the Mac platform, and can easily support my current Mac users with native applications. As of yet, I have not found any other core processor that supports a non-Windows environment", commented Jesse Hart, IT Manager of MEA.

Over the past few years, CMC has been engaged in one of the industry's most intensive re-engineering efforts of their core credit union software offering - FLEX. Code named JUICE (JAVATM, User Interface Control Environment) the user interface has been distinctively designed to achieve that which other Window's or browser-based solutions simply cannot deliver. Numbered among these achievements are graphically rich 132 column platform independent frame based client that is seat license free and provides the user with automatic dynamic updates each time it is launched from the desktop. Said Gary Eberhart, JUICE project manager, "I may be biased, but I have been a software engineer for 20 years and can confidently say that no Windows or browser-based credit union solution can touch the sophistication and ease of use offered within JUICE. Browser-based solutions that claim independence are really written for M/S Explorer with disclaimers for use with other browsers such as Firefox or Safari. Moreover, browsers lack the graphical tools (dependence upon plug-in's) that are natively available within the JAVA language."

At its core is the JAVA programming language. Competitors, programmers and system analysts of other environments attempt to diminish JAVA on varying levels. Mr. Eberhart argues, "I find these criticisms most curious. According to programming language information tracking sites, JAVA is the number one programming language in the world, second place isn't even close."

As an end user, Mr. Hart continued, "Our network environment is quite diverse, with Windows, Mac and Linux servers running alongside our IBM iSeries, and Windows, Mac and Linux clients. Thanks to the platform independence of the Java language and FLEX, we are now able to support the same program on every client machine making our training program many times easier."

With his own cup of Java in hand, Mr. Eberhart summarized, "To see this effort finally come to fruition is deeply rewarding. As we embarked on this journey several years ago, we set out to liberate our credit union clients from their dependence upon any one vertical technology. To date, we have close to fifty FLEX credit unions using JUICE in very diverse environments with more coming on monthly. Platform independent and seat license free, now that's open."