The online REPORTER
WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
May 29 - June 7 1996 Issue No 1
JAVASOFT TO BLUDGEON ACTIVEX WITH NEW ARCHITECTURE
JavaSoft will drop a bombshell on Microsoft and ActiveX this week in the shape of a Java Component Architecture (JCA) combining Java, COM and OpenDoc.
JCA, a meta API, is a direct response to Microsoft's tactic of coopting Java in its Jakarta toolset, which threatened to make Java just another OLE object on the Microsoft platform. JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard said, "The third question in every interview was 'What's your answer to ActiveX?'" and JavaSoft had little to say except how great Java was. Now its answer will be, "Something better than ActiveX, that's what."
Kannegaard said JCA, which he called "the moral equivalent" of ActiveX, displaces COM as an object framework and means "now you're not nailed to their operating systems" and won't "fall into their ActiveX trap." Echoing claims heard elsewhere round the 'net, Kannegaard said Microsoft's scheme is proprietary enough that if developers build Java applets in Jakarta they'll only be able to run them on Microsoft platforms.
JCA, itself a code name though it was previously called Java Beans, among other things, is supposed to ensure that anything built on Java will run on any platform, Java's whole point.
At press time JavaSoft had mustered Oracle, Borland and SunSoft, as official partners. A total of "seven big ones" were expected to join by May 29. While some will simply endorse JCA, others with component experience will actively help build it. Eyes instinctively turn to IBM and Apple, NC cronies and the parents of SOM and OpenDoc. When asked if they would help, Kannegaard said, "The thought has crossed our mind," but wouldn't say if JavaSoft would license OpenDoc or embark in joint development with the pair.
Netscape is also a likely participant in the fray, along with tool vendors such as Metrowerks. That many of the companies expected to endorse JCA were not officially committed at press time is partly because until last Friday JavaSoft hadn't made up its mind to announce the thing, leading to a flurry of activity over the Memorial Day weekend. JCA has been an ultra secret that surprised JavaSoft by not leaking.
NCR ADAPTS BANKING CODE TO JAVA WEB
NCR has grabbed the transaction processing software running in its ATM network and recoded it for Java, according to sources. The resulting applet, delivering Automated Teller Machine-class security to the Web desktop, should make electronic commerce a reality and will drive sales of NCR's Top End Transaction Processing software, required at the server end of the system. A formal announcement is expected in mid June.
The scheme will provide the same kind of security already provided - and accepted - by the banking industry. The 50kB client applet can be used by Java-enabled browsers, but once loaded bypasses them to communicate with the Top End server directly. That's not just for security; the NCR client is said to handle transactions 5 to 10 times faster than Netscape Navigator.
Top End, meanwhile, is designed to be capable of handling real-time credit settlement which should endear it to merchants. The cross-platform client will be free and NCR will sell Top End, server hardware and professional services to big accounts like ISPs, call centres and data warehouses.
It has quietly been working on prototypes with banks, airlines, German travel agent RK Reisen and retail giant Walmart for the last six months. It will depend on partners to integrate Top End with the verticals' software and provide stuff like forms management.
SMALL ISPS TRY TO GO GLOBAL
While the likes of MFS/UUnet attempt to provide global coverage for their users through mergers, nine smaller Internet ISPs in the Pacific Rim and Australia last week demonstrated an alternative approach when they signed a roaming agreement to give users local access in each other's territory.
The scheme, portentously titled the 'Global Reach Internet Consortium' is the brainchild of Aimnet Corporation. The Santa Clara, California-based software house touts access and administration software to let independent, geographically dispersed IAPs share billing arrangements.
Despite the initial concentration on the Pacific, Aimnet intends to rapidly expand the GRIC's membership base to other ISPs around the world. If it works as advertised then the technology should effectively blur the distinction between local and international Internet Operators.
Each ISP will levy a standard charge on their own users for roaming connections. However, Aimnet marketing specialist Michael Thompson admits that "the devil is in the detail" and getting different ISPs to agree roaming tariffs could be nightmarish. Even in the current case, the 10 members will not finalise their billing details until June. The server-side technology used to implement GRIC is based on AIMnet's Internet Management System, a suite which claims to provide everything for the ISP from customer billing and administration, through to the configuration of points of presence. The stuff runs on a SPARCstation and uses Oracle 7. Aimnet will issue regularly updated 'phone books' with the dial-in numbers and login scripts of all participating ISPs. The first nine consist of THB Asia Connect in Malaysia; Asia Online of Thailand; connect.com.au of Australia; CyberWay of Singapore; FICNET and SeedNet of Taiwan, SingNet of Singapore and UT Starcom of China.
www.aimnet.com o
NEW APIS EXTEND JAVA
JavaSoft will launch this week a comprehensive set of APIs crafted to stretch Java's boundaries from a simple programming language to an enterprise-class Internet platform.
The seven APIs extend Java off the Web and into the core business. The enterprise, servelet, management, embedded, commerce, media and security APIs were created by a partnership incorporating at least 20 companies including IBM, Netscape, Intel, SunSoft and Sun's sworn enemies, Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics.
The APIs are actually frameworks for hosts of lesser APIs. The media API, defined by JavaSoft, Macromedia, Adobe and SGI, encompasses 2D, 3D, audio, video, animation, telephony and collaboration, plus whatever new media comes along. Speech recognition is also under development.
The enterprise API includes connection for JDBC, Java IDL (Interface Definition Language) for Java-to-Corba connection, Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) for Java-to-Java connection. Kannegaard said RMI, an object version of RPC, is speedier than vanilla protocols for Java-only connections to the server.
Servelet - "100 bucks if you can come up with a better name," - pushes back pieces of functionality to the server. Designed for intranet applets that should run from the server rather than being downloaded to the client, the servelet API lets users define attributes like access control.
The commerce and security APIs support "all possible standards." Commerce includes goodies like a Java wallet, an electronic shopping cart and a secure credit card payment cassette for Visa's SET protocol. Security addresses three concerns: authentication, key management, and encryption. It supports things like long key encryption and signed applets, where each downloaded applet comes tagged with a digital signature from its source.
Some 16 management and network companies teamed up to create the management API, the big brains being HP, Tivoli and SunSoft. The API will allow management applications to standardize their agents and clients on the Internet. Sun's Solstice group will unveil a management API-based product this week. The embedded systems API, which may be one of the most sought-after pieces of code because of the pager and telephone companies wanting to run their devices on Java, is essentially a subset of all of the others. o
NUMBERS
At JavaOne, a giddy JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard said that Java will be able to claim 24,000 Web pages, 5,000 developers, 2,100 applets, 300 press members, 97 books and 30 product announcements. Oh, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Input says Lotus Notes has another two years left as the dominant groupware product before it moves to the Internet and Internet-based products catch up to it in functionality. By the year 2000, it forecasts, Internet collaboration will have 32 million users compared to 26 million for Notes.
Killen & Associates, who've got a new $500 study out called "Internet: Global Penetration and Forecast - 2000," says there were 30 million users connected to the thing worldwide as of January 1996, a figure that matches the industry's estimate of 9.5 million Internet hosts.
Zona Research's latest go-round with browser numbers casts some doubts on Netscape's vaunted 90% market share. It says if you consider all the browsers available then it looks like Navigator has only 59% and Microsoft Explorer has 17%. Zona expects Explorer to gain ground when it starts shipping with Windows 95. Zona also found that people aren't very loyal to browsers. Your average corporate user has two. Zona claims that enterprises aren't standardizing yet despite the fact that 43% of respondents were either being encouraged or required to use a particular one.
AT&T said last week it had 150,000 signed up for its Internet access service, its first indication of how things are going. It was announced at the end of February and started operating March 14.
Apple, which is said to be number two in Web servers, claimed that Web server shipments in April were up 40% over March.
London based Datamonitor's report; 'New Distribution Solutions, The Case for Interactive Services' reckonsthat the European Internet home shopping will be worth $1.8bn by the year 2000. The report says nearly 8% of all homes in Europe will have a PC by the turn of the millenium and "the vast majority" of these will be linked to the Net. Germany is set to remain the largest market with a CAGR of 108%. Overall there will be 2.9m Internet-shopping households by the end of the decade.
HOT JAVA "NOT A BROWSER"
Hot Java's a browser right? No. Sun is touting it as a set of Java building blocks that includes the browser it has been so strongly identified with. "Everyone thinks it's a browser, including half of the people in JavaSoft," said JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard.
In fact, says Sun, it is a set of classes, that can be used to build intranet applications such as collaborative systems and as one airline is reportedly doing, a Java-based mechanics workbench. JavaSoft is aiming it at ISVs, online service providers and in-house developers. The HotJava browser, one of the applications built from the classes, will ship as the browser on the new JavaOS. Over the next year, Kannegaard said, HotJava will add mail, news, WYSIWYG, workflow and collaboration. java.sun.com/HotJava o
Netscape has updated its News Server software, adding support for network management, encrypted remote administration and multithreaded conversations. It also tracks conversation threads, showing postings in context with previous discussions. News Server lets administrators restrict access to private groups. It's in beta now. o
ACTIVEX BLUDGEON
PUBLISHER'S STATEMENT
It is the purpose of this newletter to supply the industry and its users with strategic information about the Internet and the power struggle it's unleashed. Like its sister publications, Unigram.X and ClieNT Server News, it is pledged to fact and fair comment. Good honest gossip, the lifeblood of the computer business, also has its place.
Like its sisters, its format will be concise and pointed, its style a touch brash and, with any luck, a bit controversial. Its object will be to break the stories that give its readers the real inside track.
If ever that overused phrase, "paradigm shift," was apt, it's now, about the Internet. There's not a company in the industry that's not worried about whether it'll still be standing after the deluge - and that goes for Internet leaders like Sun as well as that feared monolith Microsoft.
We reckon that on this account at least it rates its own book, Online Reporter, and that we, its staff, with our experience and access, bring a lot to the party. - MO'G
Yajsu No Longer: It's Marimba Now
It's official. The Java start-up founded by JavaSoft team members Kim Polese, Arthur van Hoff, Sami Shao and company has finally picked a name: Marimba. The start-up looked for months for a tag but found all the good ones taken, then snidely got itself tagged Yajsu (Yet Another Java Start-Up) by the online journal Suck.
Polese said she'll announce the company's formation this week at JavaOne. Marimba's still keeping quiet about its product line, but Polese said it has products in early alpha to customers and will announce them this summer. It's showing them in a Marriott hotel suite this week under NDA. o
FREE-MARKET SHAKE-UP FACES DOMAIN NAMES
Ever fancied running an Internet top level domain for profit? Faced with the unwieldy popularity of the .COM domain, the Internet Society is pondering a radical restructuring of Internet domains.
Nearly 87% of Internet sub-domains are now in .COM and competition for coverted names is fierce, so the idea is to let new domains be added - say, .CHM for pharmaceutical companies, or .PUB for publishers. In fact, the Internet Draft, put out by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority doyen Jon Postel, envisages that, if the plan is accepted, 30 new international top level domains will be created every year for the next five years. The paper proposes that the whole area of domain creation and administration be opened up to free market competition. Where today, the US InterNIC handles .NET, .ORG, .COM and .EDU, in future individuals or organisations will be able to run competing registries, each of which will be allowed to administer up to three of the new domains. Postel suggests that around 10 registries will start up each year, over the next five years - they will each be able to adminster up to three of the new domains and compete with each other for customers' business.
The paper, titled "New Registries and the Delegation of International Top Level Domains", sets out how organisations will be able to apply to run a domain, how disputes will be resolved and what will happen if a registry collapses. Internet Drafts are fluid papers that carry no authority battles, but in the meantime he is trying to chivvy companies to license the patent during a three month "amnesty" which runs until the end of August. Those that opt-in during the period will be charged a yearly fee related to net online sales - anywhere between $500 to $40,000 in 1996.
The full patent can be found at: www.3wnet.com/corp/edata/freeny.txt. A contacts list of companies and attorneys fighting E-Data's claims can be found at www.patents.com/ige.sht o
Softbank Corp, Japan's biggest and most ambitious PC software distributor, is getting into the Internet advertising business via a new joint venture with the big Japanese Dentsu Ltd ad agency. A new company, Cyber Communications Inc, will open on July 1, and represent sites such as Yahoo! (in which Softbank is an investor) to win advertising. A US arm, Softbank Interactive Marketing, will also be set up. o
Integrated Systems Inc has added an HTTP server component to its pSOS System-based Internet range, so that pSOS-based embedded systems can act as fully functional Web servers. Deeply-embedded computers can then be accessed from off-the-shelf desktop browser software and Internet hardware. O however the ideas that Postel lays out have been around the consultative cycle three times now, and it seems certain that something of the sort will be implemented: Postel himself says that the draft "may be changed somewhat before it is actually put into practice".
Start pondering which could be the popular domains now - we suggest .NUZ for news, .JAV for Java companies and the self-explanatory .TIT. o
THE PATENT FIGHT IS ON FOR THE HEART OF E-COMMERCE
A patent battle for the heart of electronic commerce gets a pre-trial hearing next week when CompuServe and fourteen others face off against E-Data Corporation. E-Data, a three-man outfit, is armed with the 'Freeny Patent', issued in 1985 which, it is claimed, covers systems where users choose and pay for items which they can then download.
If it holds water, this means that those using the Web to sell software, fonts, news-stories, music or the like will have to cough up. Unsurprisingly, the defendents believe that the Secaucus, New Jersey based company is trying to apply the patent too widely and are preparing to fight. However the company says that IBM, Adobe and VocalTec have signed up for undisclosed sums.
E-Data, then called Interactive Gift Express, acquired US patent 4,528,643; 'System for Reproducing information In Material Objects at a Point of Sale Location' early in '95. It describes a system which relieves retailers from the burden of having to carry large stocks of videos, software, music tapes by letting the user select the digital content, pay for it and download it into a physical object. There are enough other questions to keep the attorneys busy for a couple of years in court: if someone selects a news story from a database and pays to have it displayed on his or her screen, is that news being 'embedded in a material object'? Company president Arnold Freilich says yes, and consequently intends to go after the publishing industry big-time.
Freilich says he has spent the last nine months trying to get people to take the patent seriously, and now the company is getting litigious. A total of 43 companies are being sued.
139 have been legally put on notice of infringement and invited to take licenses. Freilich claims that the company has private placings to fight the impending court
NETWORK COMPUTERS
Zenith Electronics Corp has launched its first Inteq interactive television sets that use the NetVision Internet-access technology it picked up from network applicance start-up Diba Inc. The Diba software, which runs on Advanced RISC Machines Ltd ARM core designed by Cirrus Logic Inc, gives NetVision the capability to browse the Web, access electronic mail and run future Java terminal applications.
Hewlett-Packard, which has been making kindly noises about NT recently, was notably absent from the NC event last week. One HP spokesperson called it "a monumental milestone in Larry Ellison's ego," and said HP wanted nothing to do with schemes with $2 margin potentials.
Meanwhile Compaq says its customers aren't interested in NCs, but favour instead the idea of thin clients using Palm Springs, Florida-based Citrix Systems Inc's WinFrame NT extension software so that they can run Windows applications over a network. Surprise, surprise: Dell dislikes the idea of NC's too.
IBM is readying a PowerPC-driven AS/400 thin client for market, one of many the company's working on. A Web browser, TCP/IP stack, Java Virtual Machine and other software will be downloaded from the server at start-up; there's no real operating system other than that as far as the end-user is concerned. It is essentially a Java terminal. There is also no local storage. AS/400 senior technical staffer Bruce Anthony said the device will ship in volume by year-end. It will cost nearer $1,000 than $500. The AS/400 device is not being tested outside IBM at present.
HDS Network Systems Inc, another X-terminal player, is set to launch a $750 network computer with built-in Internet access, Spyglass Web browser and a Java Virtual Machine on June 11th - and promises to show it at the JavaOne conference.
Cyrix Corp is said to be trying to persuade Japanese and Korean consumer electronic companies to use one of its forthcoming chips in Internet terminals, according to PC Week. The 5Gx86, not yet commercially available, is teamed with a controller chip and special software to process audio and video signals, eliminating the need for other multimedia hardware.
IBM Corp, Apple Computer, Oracle Corp and Netscape Communications duly gathered together in San Francisco a week last Monday for their joint attempt to usher in the age of the Network Computer. Their main purpose was to confirm their agreement on the set of existing standards that comprise the Network Computing Reference Profile. The agreed Internet protocols include TCP/IP, FTP, Telnet, NFS - where a distributed file system is in operation - and SNMP. Others relate to specific versions of the NC. The specification states that an NC must have a minimum screen resolution of 640 x 480 (VGA) or equivalent, a pointing device, text input capabilities and audio output. On the Web front, they must comply with HTML, HTTP, Java development environment, Java Virtual Machine and Java class libraries. There are numerous other mail, security and multimedia protocols listed in the draft profile, which can be found at www.nc.ihost.com.
The group emphasised that this was the first of many such profiles. This one will be made available for public comment and review in July and is expected to be finalised in August. The quintet plans to organise a joint Web site by the third quarter including tests for profile compliance. Any manufacturer that meets the set of standards will be able to promote its devices as "NC Profile compliant" and use the NC logo.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison predicted that even his b�te noire Microsoft Corp would eventually be among those using the NC logo. o
EIDOS & ACORN WORK ON ORACLE REFERENCE DESIGN
UK software house Eidos Plc, based in Putney, West London, is expected to license its video and audio compression technology to Oracle for use in the Oracle Network Computer reference design. The Eidos software, known as Eidos Software Codec (ESC), currently runs on PCs for compressing and playing back video sequences without the need for additional hardware.
Eidos merged itself with three games companies back in January: Domark Software Inc, Simis and Big Red Software. It has its US base at the Domark headquarters in San Mateo, California.
Meanwhile, fellow UK company Acorn Computer Group Plc, which is working on the hardware for the Oracle NC reference design, hopes to be ready with its ARM-chip based NetSurfer box by September. NetSurfer sits on top of standard domestic television sets and is operated via TV remote control handset. Hermann Hauser, co-founder and director of Acorn, plans to demonstrate the book-sized Internet box in London next week.
Apart from Acorn, the other Oracle NC manufacturing partners are Akai Electric Co Ltd, Funai Electric Co Ltd, IDEA, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, Lite-On Technology Corp, Mitac Inc, Nokia Oy, SunRiver Data Systems Inc - the only US company - Tatung Co, Teco Information Systems Co, Uniden Corp, Wearness Technology Pte Ltd, Wyse Technology and Tatung Co. o
FRANCE TELECOM EYES NCS FOR MINITEL
France Telecom is giving strong hints that it may replace Minitel terminals with Network Computers. Such a deal could create a huge market for the NC in France, because without a Minitel terminal, you have no access to the phone book there. There are around 14m Minitel terminals in France running around 25,000 applications.
France Telcom said it would be buying a number of different models from the 15 or so NC manufacturers and will run small trials in order to see which best meets the French market need. The original Minitel was given away free (but you had to pay for the call to look up each number), but the company charges for newer, premium models.
Other telcos looking at NCs include British Telecommunications Plc, Cable & Wireless Plc and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.
Right name, wrong focus. Despite its name Network Computing Devices Inc has been slow to catch on to the new NC wave. Its Explora and HMX X-terminals now run Windows as well, and are styled as network computers - but they're too expensive to cash in on the new NC fad, and don't focus on the use of thin clients or browser technology.
The company is working to cut the cost of its desktops, based on the PowerPC. o
AND SO THE NC BANDWAGON BEGINS TO ROLL...
JAVA ROUND-UP
JavaSoft say it hasn't seen hide nor hair of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs-developed Inferno operating system in any of its negotiations and claims it isn't on anybody's radar screen. Bell Labs, which is focused on the infrastructure, scorns Java as only an Internet product and the Internet as small potatoes but it did want a piece of Oracle's Network Computer action last week and says Oracle wouldn't meet its price, more than implying that Java and Kona are give-aways.
Hewlett Packard currently has an unsupported Java virtual machine available for HP/UX users to download. Sometime this Fall the company will start shipping all its HP/UX machines with Java pre-installed. Around the same time, th ecompany will include operating system support for the digital signature work that JavaSoft is doing. "Almost all of our major customers were saying they wanted Java... we had to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else" says HP Internet programme manager Phil Mindigo.
Microsoft is holding a Birds of a Feather session at JavaOne... which should be interesting,
JavaSoft has named former Solaris marketing director David Spenhoff as its director of product marketing, the first of his ilk since the tiresome Kim Polese left to drag around her perpetually unnamed start-up Marimba and its equally always-undefined product line. COO Jon Kannegaard, whom Spenhoff reports to, says JavaSoft is going to forego the thrill of having a marketing VP. JavaSoft sales and business development are in the hands of Mike Clary. Polese by the way is staging a secret cocktail party at JavaOne and a whisper suite where admittance is by way of NDA.
Sun CTO Eric Schmidt claims Java more than justifies the company's comparitively small investment in the dozen or so programmers it's had working on the thing and says it's unecessary for JavaSoft to make any money for another couple of years. That's good. We figure it'll take 'em that long based on the up-fronts, licence fees and royalties it can charge on something like Kona.
Apple has committed to building Java support into its CyberDog OpenDoc browser.
JAVAOS SET TO BATTLE ITS WAY INTO DEVICES
JavaSoft this week unveils Kona, the Java operating system now officially tagged JavaOS, that it's been so secretive about Sun CEO Scott McNealy denied it existed. If true to plan, JavaSoft will be able to flourish a list of perhaps 30 would-be licensees that have signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) and are prepared to pay money - another Java event - to take the thing on. JavaSoft would not disclose licensing terms and conditions, which may vary from licensee to licensee, anymore than it would say when Kona, in the works about a year, will ship, something apparently up to the lab boys.
The official licensee list, incomplete at press time as JavaSoft waited for confirmations from perhaps a dozen Asian customers, includes Borland, Symantec, Mitsubishi, Wyse, Metrowerks, Justsystem Corporation, Toshiba, National Semiconductor, Nortel, LSI Logic, Britain's Hugh Simon Group, Oracle and its brand new subsidiary Network Computer Inc and sister planets SunSoft, Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation and Sun Microelectronics. It embraces tool vendors who are creating competitive development environments, device makers and chip houses doing reference boards.
Kona, it appears, is only meant to run Java - and only in small devices, the largest of which will probably be these newfangled Network Computers that Oracle is on about. Guess that makes it an embedded OS.
Based on licensee plans, JavaSoft imagines it in PDAs, car navigators, set-top boxes, cell phones and pagers. JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard, who runs engineering and described the thing only sparely, calls it the "fastest smallest operating system for running Java," superior, say, to the NCOS that Oracle got from Acorn's Network Computing unit to run its first-generation ARM-based NCs. It's scalable and can run in a mere 512KB of ROM or 256KB RAM or the 3MB of RAM, 4MB of RAM of an NC. We take it it'll run the second-generation Intel-based NCs.
Although JavaSoft is very unclear about Kona's state of readiness, JavaSoft says it's up and running in the lab on Intel Pentium and Sparc chips and that, being portable, it will go on others - put there by either JavaSoft itself or by the licensee, arrangements depending. JavaSoft is also unclear about whether any of the source code is out now with potential licensees though it will be when they sign. Platform-independence is a boon to the consumer set since all software written for a Kona device can be salvaged if the processor is changed.
Kannegaard says Kona's not a microkernel and doesn't run, as Bell Labs' new OS Inferno does, on top of other operating systems. It replaces them and so it's multithreaded, manages devices, runs the Java virtual machine, does memory management and everything else, we've told, that one would expect an OS to do. It will be demo'd this week at the JavaOne Development Conference.
COREL'S APPLET OFFICE
Corel Corporation is set to unveil a needed lightweight, Java-based office suite to compete against Microsoft Office.
In bringing an office applications suite anchored by WordPerfect to Java, Corel, the owner of the once-proud WordPerfect, has hit upon perhaps the only scheme capable of restoring the lustre of the tarnished application.
Although Internet-enabled productiviy tools are increasinly commonplace, Corel will announce this week a dramatic departure from that trend with Corel Office JV, which features applications like WordPerfect JV and Quatro Pro JV, all written in Java and tied together with a new GUI framework.
The office suite will run on the NC, which can finally claim that it can handle more than browsers and applets. Office JV will emerge in beta at year-end as a series of Java classes that will be extensible to future applications. It is reported to have a modular framework that can easily integrate compound documents and Hava applets like spreadsheets.
Natural Intelligence Inc and EveryWare Development Corp have added jointly-developed connectivity software to their respective Java development and querying tools. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Natural Intelligence is the author of Roaster, a Java development environment and Mississauga, Ontario-based EveryWare has Tango, a Web-enabled SQL querying tool. Users can create queries in Tango, and use Roaster to call the query documents, which then return the data to the Java environment. The stuff comes free with Roaster DR2, which is $300 or Tango 1.5, which goes for $1,000.
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE... CLIPPER III
Three years after the Clipper Chip was laughed off the political horizon, the White House is attempting to revive encryption control efforts under the unoffical label Clipper III. In this version, the US presidency promises to remove upper limits on the strength of encryption exports in exchange for an encryption key to be escrowed with a third party.
The Clinton administration proposes that companies could export 64-bit software encryption and 80-bit hardware encryption as long as they agree to escrow keys to decode the communications. Federal authorities could access the keys with a search warrant for digital wiretapping. The odds are unlikely the escrow requirement would last, if the momentum against it persists. A Pro-Code bill introduced in the Senate by Republican senator Conrad Burns of Montana and backed by the likes of Bob Dole and Vermont's Patrick Leahy calls for all encryption strength guidelines to be removed from export policy. It prohibits mandatory key escrow, although it does give the Secretary of Commerce the abiltiy to bar sales to foreign military.
Mindful of the sometimes unwieldy federal security standards, the bill forbids Commerce and its National Institute of Standards and Technology body to "promulgate, or enforce regulations, or otherwise adopt standards or carry out policies that result in encryption standards for useby businesses or entries other than Federal computer systems." epic.org, www.nsa.gov:8080 o
IDENTITY CRISIS - WHAT USE ARE DIGITAL IDS?
With all these Java and ActiveX applets flying around the net, it's important to know who you're corresponding with, hence the popularity of digital signatures. Anyone relying on Versign's beta Class 1 Netscape-compatible certificates at the moment, should be aware that they say very little about identity.
The problem was highlighted at www.digicrime.com, a tongue-in-cheek Web site run by Kevin McCurley, a cryptography researcher at the US Sandia National Laboratories. He quite simply requested idents with the e-mail of root@localhost and a few others, and was given them. The fact that no checking of the e-mail address took place puzzled and worried him. Subsequently, other users have applied for and have also received IDs with identical addresses.
In fact, the guys at VeriSign say that this is down to a glitch in the beta system - and a system of mail-back e-mail verification will be in place by the time that Netscape 3.0 is released commercially.
Even though the finished Class 1 system may allay McCurley's fears, there are more-fundamental problems that have to be overcome by all identification systems. For example VeriSign's Class 2 certificates are meant to confer a higher level of veracity, by cross-checking the applicant's identity with the Equifax credit checking agency. The even more stringent Class 3 IDs need papers signed by a notary. But as McCurley says "I have a colleague who got a credit card offer mailed to her dead cat after it was signed up for AOL. I wonder how reliable the Equifax database is. Class 3 requires a notary. I wonder if a dead cat can become a notary?"
VeriSign itself takes a pragmatic approach and says it will make absolutely clear to users the level of confidence they can have in the various certificates. It is currently also working on ways to offer Class 2 and 3 certification outside of the US and Canada; the company is working with the International Chamber of Commerce which is currently mulling the problem. In Europe, a lot of the traditional postal offices are also getting involved in the digital ident game. VeriSign reckons it should be able to issue the first non US/Canada class 2 licenses later this year.
www.verisign.com o
EDIFY INTROS ELECTRONIC BANKING SYSTEM
Edify Corporation, a newly public start-up that made a big splash on the stock market after Visa endorsed its technology, has introduced its Internet-based Electronic Banking System. Edify EBS combines Web banking services with more-traditional electronic banking over telephones, fax and financial management software like Intuit's Quicken. The first release will include home banking, bill payment, dynamic target marketing, personal profile, message center and custoemr service teleconferencing modules. It will sell its technology to banks at the hefty price tag of $195,000 starting this summer.
www.edify.com o
FORRESTER POURS COLD WATER OVER NCS
The new breed of $500 Internet network terminals will not be good enough to satisfy consumer demand, according to US analysts Forrester Research.
"Although the vision of millions of consumers using cheap, low-overhead Internet devices is seductive to content providers and advertisers, the device won't deliver," says the report. Senior analyst Josh Bernoff claims "the technology is not good enough, the content will be inadequate, and distribution will pose a substantial hurdle. There are other ways to get on-line that are better investments long-term."
The report points out that most successful consumer electronic products deliver easy defined value at prices around or below $200. Web appliances are priced too high, and only display the most basic HTML pages, not the 3D graphics or virtual reality that would compel consumers to buy the products.
The terminals may find more favour with information system managers, at least according to rival researchers IDC, which has found that 15% of IS managers feel they are viable. But even IDC, which splits the Internet access device market into six parts, claims that such devices will pose no threat to PCs for at least 5 years. o
WORLDWIDE DESKTOP UNIT SHIPMENTS FOR THE YEAR 2000
PCs (general purpose) 76.4%
Internet PCs 2.6%
Internet terminals 3.2%
Set top boxes 6.0%
DICE* 11.8%
*Digital interactive consumer electronic machines
Source:Forrester Research
HP has launched HP Depot/J, a warehouse-style toolset that lets Java developers deploy business rules and legacy objects in applications. It includes a browser to select the objects, an engine that converts them to Java-aware objects and development tools for placing them in Java applications.
The pieces of Depot/J were known internally as Cream and Sugar, names that HP legal quashed. Computer Reseller News erroneously stated that Cream and Sugar would convert Java into ActiveX, C++ and other objects, a role HP said was never intended for the product. www.hp.com o
COMPUSERVE: OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE WEB
CompuServe became the latest in a string of online services to abandon its proprietary environment and move to the Internet, raising issues of how it will maintain its profit margins. CompuServe follows Microsoft, Prodigy and AT&T in switching to the Internet, leaving only America Online clinging to its closed environment despite making AOL services available on the Web.
CompuServe said its Internet plan, code named Red Dog, will create a suite of services available via a standard Web browser by year-end. The H&R Block spin-out claims its development costs will decrease because it will be able to buy more content instead of designing it in-house; it will soon be able to bring product to market 75% faster.
The company is still developing the authorization technology to monitor and charge customers accessing CompuServe from Web browsers. CompuServe, which gets most of its revenue from subscriber fees, admitted it will need more advertisers to keep profits up under Red Dog. The company thinks users are still afraid or unable to navigate the Web quickly and so its proprietary scheme will pick up new customers on that basis. CompuServe will continue to support its proprietary CompuServe Information Management service for as long as there is customer interest. o
MFS & UUNET UNVEIL AGRESSIVE ROAMING PLANS
MFS Communications Co Inc's proposed $2bn purchase of UUNet Technologies has, if anything speeded up the two behemoths separate plans to provide global service. MFS announced late last week that it intends to create a series of Internet Service Provider (ISP) interconnect facilities across Europe, on the same lines as the large Metropolitan Access Exchanges (MAEs) that it already has in the US.
First on the shopping list is Paris where MFS says it has already reached agreement to provide a number of (unamed) Internet Service Providers with an interconnect facility. The Paris facility will be joined by others, most probably in the European cities where MFS already has a network presence (London, Frankfurt, Stockholm and Zurich). The company gave no time-
scales for the development.
Meanwhile UUNet's ISP buying spree have begun to bear fruit with the announcement of an international roaming service in 92 cities in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. Next month Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Singapore, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong will be added to the list. Users will be charged $6 per hour surcharge.
The service will expand; UUnet claims to have local access in 288 cities outside the US. Over the last six months the company has announced a planned investment in AUNET Corporation; a joint venture with the Taiwanese government to provide Internet services in Asia; acquired a majority interest in UUNET Canada purchased Pipex in the UK and bought 40% of Eunet Germany.
Under the terms of the merge-over Microsoft is trading its 13% stake in UUNet for 4% in MFS. o
INTEL GETS INTO JAVA
Never one to miss out on a party for long, Intel is abandoning its perceived detachment from the Java crowd by creating media extensions to Java that may work into the next version of the language.
Intel is showing extensions for local and streaming audio/video, "3D audio" and animation this week at JavaOne. Intel is not a Java licensee, but says its media plans build on top of the language and don't require a license. Intel's Java product manager Chris Rotvik said that they will add function to the "media poor" Java 1.0 while working to see that they become part of the core media API being defined by Sun, Intel, Silicon Graphics and Macromedia for Java 1.1.
Rotvik said Intel wants to give customers "the performance on the Internet that they're accustomed to seeing on their PCs." Intel will support the media characteristics on its own platform natively; while Rotvik claimed the move isn't "an interesting way to make money in the Intel/Java space," it's perhaps not coincidental or out of character that such support will make those extensions work better on Intel platforms than any other.
The software-only pieces arose from the same Intel initiatives that created MMX and Indeo. The media extensions are likely to become product, but Intel's ing out how making them a product would affect its API partners.
Intel's "realistic sound experience" extension features what Intel calls 3D audio, which responds to direction and proximity cues and could emulate an approaching jet, for example. It's already being worked into VRML. The animation extension features an object-oriented engine that in future Java releases will be placed in the Java core to smooth out sometimes crude animation and enable complex sequences. It performs "2 1/2D," essentially 2D planes stacked to give animations more depth.
The audio and video media classes focus on data streaming and playback. They build on the ITU standard H.263 and G.723 video and voice-quality codecs and support MIDI and .WAV protocols as wells as Intel's own Indeo.
www.intel.com/iaweb/internet.htm o
Business@Web, the Internet start-up that netted former SAP America president Klaus Besier as CEO, has signed a two-part agreement to move human resources giant PeopleSoft to the Internet. Business@Web will extend PeopleSoft's key applications to the Internet in phase one of the agreement, with phase two calling for it to port its Open Extensions programming interface to the PeopleSoft platform so future applications developed will be Internet-enabled o
02'S JAVA-DATABASE LINK
French object database company O2 Technology Inc will announce its promised support for Java at the JavaOne development conference this week with Java interfaces for relational and object databases. From September it will offer an interface allowing developers to store Java applets in relational or object databases. O2 says its runtime sits atop the low-level JavaSoft JDBC API and doesn't require the programmer to know the structure of the relational database being used.
Currently the Java support offered by relational vendors requires the developer to write a mapper to map Java objects to relational rows and tables. The interface provides automatic generation of the database schema from the Java schema and also interfaces to existing C++ and Smalltalk interfaces. o
DOT GOSSIP
Compaq is gearing up to restructure and position itself for the Internet, essentially putting its Web servers in the Systems Division, with the rest of the Internet pieces to fall under a yet-to-be-defined Internet group. Meanwhile, Compaq reportedly has over 20 Internet investments and research initiatives underway.
Commenting on its Web-domination plan, (page 1) NCR sources say they expect little competition from the competing Tuxedo TP system, claiming that BEA Systems hasn't the resources or the mentality to go after the enterprise. Encina is about the closest. IBM isn't expected to make CICS Internet capable until next year.
Hewlett Packard reckons that it has the worlds largest Intranet with 1,600 Web servers and Netscape Navigator sitting on more than 70,000 desktops.
Playboy Enterprises Inc set new advertising rates for space on its Playboy Web site - www.playboy.com - and signed six new advertisers for the space: new prices range from $1,250 to $26,250 per hyperlink per month, based on a cost-per-impression rate structure.
MFS Communications Co Inc is effusive about its hot new Metropolitan Area Network in Paris, except for one aspect, where it gets very coy, saying the backbone network "has been laid through Les Egouts de Paris - the city's underground network of utility tunnels." Well yes, but actually they're the sewers.
With regard to the unusual levels of cooperation established during development of the seven new Java APIs (see page 2), JavaSoft's Jon Kannegaard said the individual companies will "bury the hatchet" until the API's finished, then go build their products and clobber each other.
The Federal Election Commission has refused CompuServe's offer to grant free Internet access to political candidates during the election year, ruling that such a gift violates the ban on corporate donations to candidates.
Although Netscape is readying Navigator 3.0 for release this quarter with Java support for the Mac, it's yet to release Java for Windows 3.1. It's supposed to have a 3.0 beta with Java and JavaScript on the Microsoft platform before the end of June.
A tiny Internet service provider called Log On America is taking CompuServe to court in a dispute over the company's logo, which features a globe superimposed on a computer screen, as does CompuServe's. The suit follows a May 1 letter from CompuServe which accused the Providence, Rhode Island company of trademark infringement. Log On America claims the two logos are different enough to invalidate the complaint. The suit asks for unspecified damages, a jury trial and a judgement that the ISP isn't liable for infringement.
The brash online journal Suck, deriding the fantasy of profits in the Internet business, quoted a Berkley professor who showed the way words break down on the Web: applications are now applets, and profits are now the pits.
Network Intensive, a division of consulting firm Compute Intensive, is shipping a turnkey Internet firewall gateway aimed at small business. InterCept is configured for Web, FTP, mail and news serving. It's available direct.
JavaSoft's Kona has now been dubbed JavaOS, but it seems that JavaSoft is having a hard time adjusting to the new name. As are we.
Microsoft has released a free downloadable ActiveX animation player for PowerPoint capable of displaying Shockwave-type animation. It's only a reader. A new animation add-on for PowerPoint 95 is necessary to create animation sequences.
Netscape is planning a dial-up version of Navigator for the Mac with a built-in PPP stack. It's reportedly outsourced the stack work to a start-up called Rockstar Studios Inc, best known for its FreePPP shareware.
Stand by for more Web-server perform-ance wars. Client/Server Labs, the people behind RPMark95 and RPM/dbs, say they will have an Intranet benchtest ready in July.
In a sign of the times ParcPlace-Digitalk, the unofficial home of that other object language, has launched a program to incorporate Java into its Smalltalk-based product line. It will roll out in July Parts for Java, a visual development tool that includes a browser, a toolset and an editor for Java classes. www.parcplace.com
CMP Publications' Network Computing injected a doomsday note in a recent article claiming an Internet meltdown if its routing and infrastructure issues aren't resolved soon. It quotes a senior Sprint engineer who says that if we "just let things go," the Internet could be nonfunctional within five to 10 months. The remedies include the costly process of renumbering networks and fees for addresses and routing.
Talking of the death of the Net, White Pines Software's CU-SeeMe video-conferencing package is often pilloried because of the way it sprays UDP packets around. A new version of the reflector is said to cure this, introducing bandwith monitoring for the first time.
Digital Equipment rolled out the first of its AltaVista products with a mail server that can integrate with applications like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. The NT-based server can also send multimedia documents across the Internet. www.altavista.software.digital.com
Microsoft is sending Internet Explorer 3.0 to public beta this week with the obligatory support for Java, JavaScript and animated GIFs. In fact, it accidentally made copies available a couple of weeks early when someone in Redmond set permissions on the server incorrectly, letting surfers get away with some early copies, as the excellent www.browserwatch.com site noted. o
online REPORTER, a sister publication of Unigram.X and ClieNT Server News, is published weekly in Europe by:
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WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
May 29 - June 7 1996 Issue No 1
JAVASOFT TO BLUDGEON ACTIVEX WITH NEW ARCHITECTURE
JavaSoft will drop a bombshell on Microsoft and ActiveX this week in the shape of a Java Component Architecture (JCA) combining Java, COM and OpenDoc.
JCA, a meta API, is a direct response to Microsoft's tactic of coopting Java in its Jakarta toolset, which threatened to make Java just another OLE object on the Microsoft platform. JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard said, "The third question in every interview was 'What's your answer to ActiveX?'" and JavaSoft had little to say except how great Java was. Now its answer will be, "Something better than ActiveX, that's what."
Kannegaard said JCA, which he called "the moral equivalent" of ActiveX, displaces COM as an object framework and means "now you're not nailed to their operating systems" and won't "fall into their ActiveX trap." Echoing claims heard elsewhere round the 'net, Kannegaard said Microsoft's scheme is proprietary enough that if developers build Java applets in Jakarta they'll only be able to run them on Microsoft platforms.
JCA, itself a code name though it was previously called Java Beans, among other things, is supposed to ensure that anything built on Java will run on any platform, Java's whole point.
At press time JavaSoft had mustered Oracle, Borland and SunSoft, as official partners. A total of "seven big ones" were expected to join by May 29. While some will simply endorse JCA, others with component experience will actively help build it. Eyes instinctively turn to IBM and Apple, NC cronies and the parents of SOM and OpenDoc. When asked if they would help, Kannegaard said, "The thought has crossed our mind," but wouldn't say if JavaSoft would license OpenDoc or embark in joint development with the pair.
Netscape is also a likely participant in the fray, along with tool vendors such as Metrowerks. That many of the companies expected to endorse JCA were not officially committed at press time is partly because until last Friday JavaSoft hadn't made up its mind to announce the thing, leading to a flurry of activity over the Memorial Day weekend. JCA has been an ultra secret that surprised JavaSoft by not leaking.
NCR ADAPTS BANKING CODE TO JAVA WEB
NCR has grabbed the transaction processing software running in its ATM network and recoded it for Java, according to sources. The resulting applet, delivering Automated Teller Machine-class security to the Web desktop, should make electronic commerce a reality and will drive sales of NCR's Top End Transaction Processing software, required at the server end of the system. A formal announcement is expected in mid June.
The scheme will provide the same kind of security already provided - and accepted - by the banking industry. The 50kB client applet can be used by Java-enabled browsers, but once loaded bypasses them to communicate with the Top End server directly. That's not just for security; the NCR client is said to handle transactions 5 to 10 times faster than Netscape Navigator.
Top End, meanwhile, is designed to be capable of handling real-time credit settlement which should endear it to merchants. The cross-platform client will be free and NCR will sell Top End, server hardware and professional services to big accounts like ISPs, call centres and data warehouses.
It has quietly been working on prototypes with banks, airlines, German travel agent RK Reisen and retail giant Walmart for the last six months. It will depend on partners to integrate Top End with the verticals' software and provide stuff like forms management.
SMALL ISPS TRY TO GO GLOBAL
While the likes of MFS/UUnet attempt to provide global coverage for their users through mergers, nine smaller Internet ISPs in the Pacific Rim and Australia last week demonstrated an alternative approach when they signed a roaming agreement to give users local access in each other's territory.
The scheme, portentously titled the 'Global Reach Internet Consortium' is the brainchild of Aimnet Corporation. The Santa Clara, California-based software house touts access and administration software to let independent, geographically dispersed IAPs share billing arrangements.
Despite the initial concentration on the Pacific, Aimnet intends to rapidly expand the GRIC's membership base to other ISPs around the world. If it works as advertised then the technology should effectively blur the distinction between local and international Internet Operators.
Each ISP will levy a standard charge on their own users for roaming connections. However, Aimnet marketing specialist Michael Thompson admits that "the devil is in the detail" and getting different ISPs to agree roaming tariffs could be nightmarish. Even in the current case, the 10 members will not finalise their billing details until June. The server-side technology used to implement GRIC is based on AIMnet's Internet Management System, a suite which claims to provide everything for the ISP from customer billing and administration, through to the configuration of points of presence. The stuff runs on a SPARCstation and uses Oracle 7. Aimnet will issue regularly updated 'phone books' with the dial-in numbers and login scripts of all participating ISPs. The first nine consist of THB Asia Connect in Malaysia; Asia Online of Thailand; connect.com.au of Australia; CyberWay of Singapore; FICNET and SeedNet of Taiwan, SingNet of Singapore and UT Starcom of China.
www.aimnet.com o
NEW APIS EXTEND JAVA
JavaSoft will launch this week a comprehensive set of APIs crafted to stretch Java's boundaries from a simple programming language to an enterprise-class Internet platform.
The seven APIs extend Java off the Web and into the core business. The enterprise, servelet, management, embedded, commerce, media and security APIs were created by a partnership incorporating at least 20 companies including IBM, Netscape, Intel, SunSoft and Sun's sworn enemies, Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics.
The APIs are actually frameworks for hosts of lesser APIs. The media API, defined by JavaSoft, Macromedia, Adobe and SGI, encompasses 2D, 3D, audio, video, animation, telephony and collaboration, plus whatever new media comes along. Speech recognition is also under development.
The enterprise API includes connection for JDBC, Java IDL (Interface Definition Language) for Java-to-Corba connection, Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) for Java-to-Java connection. Kannegaard said RMI, an object version of RPC, is speedier than vanilla protocols for Java-only connections to the server.
Servelet - "100 bucks if you can come up with a better name," - pushes back pieces of functionality to the server. Designed for intranet applets that should run from the server rather than being downloaded to the client, the servelet API lets users define attributes like access control.
The commerce and security APIs support "all possible standards." Commerce includes goodies like a Java wallet, an electronic shopping cart and a secure credit card payment cassette for Visa's SET protocol. Security addresses three concerns: authentication, key management, and encryption. It supports things like long key encryption and signed applets, where each downloaded applet comes tagged with a digital signature from its source.
Some 16 management and network companies teamed up to create the management API, the big brains being HP, Tivoli and SunSoft. The API will allow management applications to standardize their agents and clients on the Internet. Sun's Solstice group will unveil a management API-based product this week. The embedded systems API, which may be one of the most sought-after pieces of code because of the pager and telephone companies wanting to run their devices on Java, is essentially a subset of all of the others. o
NUMBERS
At JavaOne, a giddy JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard said that Java will be able to claim 24,000 Web pages, 5,000 developers, 2,100 applets, 300 press members, 97 books and 30 product announcements. Oh, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Input says Lotus Notes has another two years left as the dominant groupware product before it moves to the Internet and Internet-based products catch up to it in functionality. By the year 2000, it forecasts, Internet collaboration will have 32 million users compared to 26 million for Notes.
Killen & Associates, who've got a new $500 study out called "Internet: Global Penetration and Forecast - 2000," says there were 30 million users connected to the thing worldwide as of January 1996, a figure that matches the industry's estimate of 9.5 million Internet hosts.
Zona Research's latest go-round with browser numbers casts some doubts on Netscape's vaunted 90% market share. It says if you consider all the browsers available then it looks like Navigator has only 59% and Microsoft Explorer has 17%. Zona expects Explorer to gain ground when it starts shipping with Windows 95. Zona also found that people aren't very loyal to browsers. Your average corporate user has two. Zona claims that enterprises aren't standardizing yet despite the fact that 43% of respondents were either being encouraged or required to use a particular one.
AT&T said last week it had 150,000 signed up for its Internet access service, its first indication of how things are going. It was announced at the end of February and started operating March 14.
Apple, which is said to be number two in Web servers, claimed that Web server shipments in April were up 40% over March.
London based Datamonitor's report; 'New Distribution Solutions, The Case for Interactive Services' reckonsthat the European Internet home shopping will be worth $1.8bn by the year 2000. The report says nearly 8% of all homes in Europe will have a PC by the turn of the millenium and "the vast majority" of these will be linked to the Net. Germany is set to remain the largest market with a CAGR of 108%. Overall there will be 2.9m Internet-shopping households by the end of the decade.
HOT JAVA "NOT A BROWSER"
Hot Java's a browser right? No. Sun is touting it as a set of Java building blocks that includes the browser it has been so strongly identified with. "Everyone thinks it's a browser, including half of the people in JavaSoft," said JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard.
In fact, says Sun, it is a set of classes, that can be used to build intranet applications such as collaborative systems and as one airline is reportedly doing, a Java-based mechanics workbench. JavaSoft is aiming it at ISVs, online service providers and in-house developers. The HotJava browser, one of the applications built from the classes, will ship as the browser on the new JavaOS. Over the next year, Kannegaard said, HotJava will add mail, news, WYSIWYG, workflow and collaboration. java.sun.com/HotJava o
Netscape has updated its News Server software, adding support for network management, encrypted remote administration and multithreaded conversations. It also tracks conversation threads, showing postings in context with previous discussions. News Server lets administrators restrict access to private groups. It's in beta now. o
ACTIVEX BLUDGEON
PUBLISHER'S STATEMENT
It is the purpose of this newletter to supply the industry and its users with strategic information about the Internet and the power struggle it's unleashed. Like its sister publications, Unigram.X and ClieNT Server News, it is pledged to fact and fair comment. Good honest gossip, the lifeblood of the computer business, also has its place.
Like its sisters, its format will be concise and pointed, its style a touch brash and, with any luck, a bit controversial. Its object will be to break the stories that give its readers the real inside track.
If ever that overused phrase, "paradigm shift," was apt, it's now, about the Internet. There's not a company in the industry that's not worried about whether it'll still be standing after the deluge - and that goes for Internet leaders like Sun as well as that feared monolith Microsoft.
We reckon that on this account at least it rates its own book, Online Reporter, and that we, its staff, with our experience and access, bring a lot to the party. - MO'G
Yajsu No Longer: It's Marimba Now
It's official. The Java start-up founded by JavaSoft team members Kim Polese, Arthur van Hoff, Sami Shao and company has finally picked a name: Marimba. The start-up looked for months for a tag but found all the good ones taken, then snidely got itself tagged Yajsu (Yet Another Java Start-Up) by the online journal Suck.
Polese said she'll announce the company's formation this week at JavaOne. Marimba's still keeping quiet about its product line, but Polese said it has products in early alpha to customers and will announce them this summer. It's showing them in a Marriott hotel suite this week under NDA. o
FREE-MARKET SHAKE-UP FACES DOMAIN NAMES
Ever fancied running an Internet top level domain for profit? Faced with the unwieldy popularity of the .COM domain, the Internet Society is pondering a radical restructuring of Internet domains.
Nearly 87% of Internet sub-domains are now in .COM and competition for coverted names is fierce, so the idea is to let new domains be added - say, .CHM for pharmaceutical companies, or .PUB for publishers. In fact, the Internet Draft, put out by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority doyen Jon Postel, envisages that, if the plan is accepted, 30 new international top level domains will be created every year for the next five years. The paper proposes that the whole area of domain creation and administration be opened up to free market competition. Where today, the US InterNIC handles .NET, .ORG, .COM and .EDU, in future individuals or organisations will be able to run competing registries, each of which will be allowed to administer up to three of the new domains. Postel suggests that around 10 registries will start up each year, over the next five years - they will each be able to adminster up to three of the new domains and compete with each other for customers' business.
The paper, titled "New Registries and the Delegation of International Top Level Domains", sets out how organisations will be able to apply to run a domain, how disputes will be resolved and what will happen if a registry collapses. Internet Drafts are fluid papers that carry no authority battles, but in the meantime he is trying to chivvy companies to license the patent during a three month "amnesty" which runs until the end of August. Those that opt-in during the period will be charged a yearly fee related to net online sales - anywhere between $500 to $40,000 in 1996.
The full patent can be found at: www.3wnet.com/corp/edata/freeny.txt. A contacts list of companies and attorneys fighting E-Data's claims can be found at www.patents.com/ige.sht o
Softbank Corp, Japan's biggest and most ambitious PC software distributor, is getting into the Internet advertising business via a new joint venture with the big Japanese Dentsu Ltd ad agency. A new company, Cyber Communications Inc, will open on July 1, and represent sites such as Yahoo! (in which Softbank is an investor) to win advertising. A US arm, Softbank Interactive Marketing, will also be set up. o
Integrated Systems Inc has added an HTTP server component to its pSOS System-based Internet range, so that pSOS-based embedded systems can act as fully functional Web servers. Deeply-embedded computers can then be accessed from off-the-shelf desktop browser software and Internet hardware. O however the ideas that Postel lays out have been around the consultative cycle three times now, and it seems certain that something of the sort will be implemented: Postel himself says that the draft "may be changed somewhat before it is actually put into practice".
Start pondering which could be the popular domains now - we suggest .NUZ for news, .JAV for Java companies and the self-explanatory .TIT. o
THE PATENT FIGHT IS ON FOR THE HEART OF E-COMMERCE
A patent battle for the heart of electronic commerce gets a pre-trial hearing next week when CompuServe and fourteen others face off against E-Data Corporation. E-Data, a three-man outfit, is armed with the 'Freeny Patent', issued in 1985 which, it is claimed, covers systems where users choose and pay for items which they can then download.
If it holds water, this means that those using the Web to sell software, fonts, news-stories, music or the like will have to cough up. Unsurprisingly, the defendents believe that the Secaucus, New Jersey based company is trying to apply the patent too widely and are preparing to fight. However the company says that IBM, Adobe and VocalTec have signed up for undisclosed sums.
E-Data, then called Interactive Gift Express, acquired US patent 4,528,643; 'System for Reproducing information In Material Objects at a Point of Sale Location' early in '95. It describes a system which relieves retailers from the burden of having to carry large stocks of videos, software, music tapes by letting the user select the digital content, pay for it and download it into a physical object. There are enough other questions to keep the attorneys busy for a couple of years in court: if someone selects a news story from a database and pays to have it displayed on his or her screen, is that news being 'embedded in a material object'? Company president Arnold Freilich says yes, and consequently intends to go after the publishing industry big-time.
Freilich says he has spent the last nine months trying to get people to take the patent seriously, and now the company is getting litigious. A total of 43 companies are being sued.
139 have been legally put on notice of infringement and invited to take licenses. Freilich claims that the company has private placings to fight the impending court
NETWORK COMPUTERS
Zenith Electronics Corp has launched its first Inteq interactive television sets that use the NetVision Internet-access technology it picked up from network applicance start-up Diba Inc. The Diba software, which runs on Advanced RISC Machines Ltd ARM core designed by Cirrus Logic Inc, gives NetVision the capability to browse the Web, access electronic mail and run future Java terminal applications.
Hewlett-Packard, which has been making kindly noises about NT recently, was notably absent from the NC event last week. One HP spokesperson called it "a monumental milestone in Larry Ellison's ego," and said HP wanted nothing to do with schemes with $2 margin potentials.
Meanwhile Compaq says its customers aren't interested in NCs, but favour instead the idea of thin clients using Palm Springs, Florida-based Citrix Systems Inc's WinFrame NT extension software so that they can run Windows applications over a network. Surprise, surprise: Dell dislikes the idea of NC's too.
IBM is readying a PowerPC-driven AS/400 thin client for market, one of many the company's working on. A Web browser, TCP/IP stack, Java Virtual Machine and other software will be downloaded from the server at start-up; there's no real operating system other than that as far as the end-user is concerned. It is essentially a Java terminal. There is also no local storage. AS/400 senior technical staffer Bruce Anthony said the device will ship in volume by year-end. It will cost nearer $1,000 than $500. The AS/400 device is not being tested outside IBM at present.
HDS Network Systems Inc, another X-terminal player, is set to launch a $750 network computer with built-in Internet access, Spyglass Web browser and a Java Virtual Machine on June 11th - and promises to show it at the JavaOne conference.
Cyrix Corp is said to be trying to persuade Japanese and Korean consumer electronic companies to use one of its forthcoming chips in Internet terminals, according to PC Week. The 5Gx86, not yet commercially available, is teamed with a controller chip and special software to process audio and video signals, eliminating the need for other multimedia hardware.
IBM Corp, Apple Computer, Oracle Corp and Netscape Communications duly gathered together in San Francisco a week last Monday for their joint attempt to usher in the age of the Network Computer. Their main purpose was to confirm their agreement on the set of existing standards that comprise the Network Computing Reference Profile. The agreed Internet protocols include TCP/IP, FTP, Telnet, NFS - where a distributed file system is in operation - and SNMP. Others relate to specific versions of the NC. The specification states that an NC must have a minimum screen resolution of 640 x 480 (VGA) or equivalent, a pointing device, text input capabilities and audio output. On the Web front, they must comply with HTML, HTTP, Java development environment, Java Virtual Machine and Java class libraries. There are numerous other mail, security and multimedia protocols listed in the draft profile, which can be found at www.nc.ihost.com.
The group emphasised that this was the first of many such profiles. This one will be made available for public comment and review in July and is expected to be finalised in August. The quintet plans to organise a joint Web site by the third quarter including tests for profile compliance. Any manufacturer that meets the set of standards will be able to promote its devices as "NC Profile compliant" and use the NC logo.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison predicted that even his b�te noire Microsoft Corp would eventually be among those using the NC logo. o
EIDOS & ACORN WORK ON ORACLE REFERENCE DESIGN
UK software house Eidos Plc, based in Putney, West London, is expected to license its video and audio compression technology to Oracle for use in the Oracle Network Computer reference design. The Eidos software, known as Eidos Software Codec (ESC), currently runs on PCs for compressing and playing back video sequences without the need for additional hardware.
Eidos merged itself with three games companies back in January: Domark Software Inc, Simis and Big Red Software. It has its US base at the Domark headquarters in San Mateo, California.
Meanwhile, fellow UK company Acorn Computer Group Plc, which is working on the hardware for the Oracle NC reference design, hopes to be ready with its ARM-chip based NetSurfer box by September. NetSurfer sits on top of standard domestic television sets and is operated via TV remote control handset. Hermann Hauser, co-founder and director of Acorn, plans to demonstrate the book-sized Internet box in London next week.
Apart from Acorn, the other Oracle NC manufacturing partners are Akai Electric Co Ltd, Funai Electric Co Ltd, IDEA, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, Lite-On Technology Corp, Mitac Inc, Nokia Oy, SunRiver Data Systems Inc - the only US company - Tatung Co, Teco Information Systems Co, Uniden Corp, Wearness Technology Pte Ltd, Wyse Technology and Tatung Co. o
FRANCE TELECOM EYES NCS FOR MINITEL
France Telecom is giving strong hints that it may replace Minitel terminals with Network Computers. Such a deal could create a huge market for the NC in France, because without a Minitel terminal, you have no access to the phone book there. There are around 14m Minitel terminals in France running around 25,000 applications.
France Telcom said it would be buying a number of different models from the 15 or so NC manufacturers and will run small trials in order to see which best meets the French market need. The original Minitel was given away free (but you had to pay for the call to look up each number), but the company charges for newer, premium models.
Other telcos looking at NCs include British Telecommunications Plc, Cable & Wireless Plc and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.
Right name, wrong focus. Despite its name Network Computing Devices Inc has been slow to catch on to the new NC wave. Its Explora and HMX X-terminals now run Windows as well, and are styled as network computers - but they're too expensive to cash in on the new NC fad, and don't focus on the use of thin clients or browser technology.
The company is working to cut the cost of its desktops, based on the PowerPC. o
AND SO THE NC BANDWAGON BEGINS TO ROLL...
JAVA ROUND-UP
JavaSoft say it hasn't seen hide nor hair of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs-developed Inferno operating system in any of its negotiations and claims it isn't on anybody's radar screen. Bell Labs, which is focused on the infrastructure, scorns Java as only an Internet product and the Internet as small potatoes but it did want a piece of Oracle's Network Computer action last week and says Oracle wouldn't meet its price, more than implying that Java and Kona are give-aways.
Hewlett Packard currently has an unsupported Java virtual machine available for HP/UX users to download. Sometime this Fall the company will start shipping all its HP/UX machines with Java pre-installed. Around the same time, th ecompany will include operating system support for the digital signature work that JavaSoft is doing. "Almost all of our major customers were saying they wanted Java... we had to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else" says HP Internet programme manager Phil Mindigo.
Microsoft is holding a Birds of a Feather session at JavaOne... which should be interesting,
JavaSoft has named former Solaris marketing director David Spenhoff as its director of product marketing, the first of his ilk since the tiresome Kim Polese left to drag around her perpetually unnamed start-up Marimba and its equally always-undefined product line. COO Jon Kannegaard, whom Spenhoff reports to, says JavaSoft is going to forego the thrill of having a marketing VP. JavaSoft sales and business development are in the hands of Mike Clary. Polese by the way is staging a secret cocktail party at JavaOne and a whisper suite where admittance is by way of NDA.
Sun CTO Eric Schmidt claims Java more than justifies the company's comparitively small investment in the dozen or so programmers it's had working on the thing and says it's unecessary for JavaSoft to make any money for another couple of years. That's good. We figure it'll take 'em that long based on the up-fronts, licence fees and royalties it can charge on something like Kona.
Apple has committed to building Java support into its CyberDog OpenDoc browser.
JAVAOS SET TO BATTLE ITS WAY INTO DEVICES
JavaSoft this week unveils Kona, the Java operating system now officially tagged JavaOS, that it's been so secretive about Sun CEO Scott McNealy denied it existed. If true to plan, JavaSoft will be able to flourish a list of perhaps 30 would-be licensees that have signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) and are prepared to pay money - another Java event - to take the thing on. JavaSoft would not disclose licensing terms and conditions, which may vary from licensee to licensee, anymore than it would say when Kona, in the works about a year, will ship, something apparently up to the lab boys.
The official licensee list, incomplete at press time as JavaSoft waited for confirmations from perhaps a dozen Asian customers, includes Borland, Symantec, Mitsubishi, Wyse, Metrowerks, Justsystem Corporation, Toshiba, National Semiconductor, Nortel, LSI Logic, Britain's Hugh Simon Group, Oracle and its brand new subsidiary Network Computer Inc and sister planets SunSoft, Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation and Sun Microelectronics. It embraces tool vendors who are creating competitive development environments, device makers and chip houses doing reference boards.
Kona, it appears, is only meant to run Java - and only in small devices, the largest of which will probably be these newfangled Network Computers that Oracle is on about. Guess that makes it an embedded OS.
Based on licensee plans, JavaSoft imagines it in PDAs, car navigators, set-top boxes, cell phones and pagers. JavaSoft COO Jon Kannegaard, who runs engineering and described the thing only sparely, calls it the "fastest smallest operating system for running Java," superior, say, to the NCOS that Oracle got from Acorn's Network Computing unit to run its first-generation ARM-based NCs. It's scalable and can run in a mere 512KB of ROM or 256KB RAM or the 3MB of RAM, 4MB of RAM of an NC. We take it it'll run the second-generation Intel-based NCs.
Although JavaSoft is very unclear about Kona's state of readiness, JavaSoft says it's up and running in the lab on Intel Pentium and Sparc chips and that, being portable, it will go on others - put there by either JavaSoft itself or by the licensee, arrangements depending. JavaSoft is also unclear about whether any of the source code is out now with potential licensees though it will be when they sign. Platform-independence is a boon to the consumer set since all software written for a Kona device can be salvaged if the processor is changed.
Kannegaard says Kona's not a microkernel and doesn't run, as Bell Labs' new OS Inferno does, on top of other operating systems. It replaces them and so it's multithreaded, manages devices, runs the Java virtual machine, does memory management and everything else, we've told, that one would expect an OS to do. It will be demo'd this week at the JavaOne Development Conference.
COREL'S APPLET OFFICE
Corel Corporation is set to unveil a needed lightweight, Java-based office suite to compete against Microsoft Office.
In bringing an office applications suite anchored by WordPerfect to Java, Corel, the owner of the once-proud WordPerfect, has hit upon perhaps the only scheme capable of restoring the lustre of the tarnished application.
Although Internet-enabled productiviy tools are increasinly commonplace, Corel will announce this week a dramatic departure from that trend with Corel Office JV, which features applications like WordPerfect JV and Quatro Pro JV, all written in Java and tied together with a new GUI framework.
The office suite will run on the NC, which can finally claim that it can handle more than browsers and applets. Office JV will emerge in beta at year-end as a series of Java classes that will be extensible to future applications. It is reported to have a modular framework that can easily integrate compound documents and Hava applets like spreadsheets.
Natural Intelligence Inc and EveryWare Development Corp have added jointly-developed connectivity software to their respective Java development and querying tools. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Natural Intelligence is the author of Roaster, a Java development environment and Mississauga, Ontario-based EveryWare has Tango, a Web-enabled SQL querying tool. Users can create queries in Tango, and use Roaster to call the query documents, which then return the data to the Java environment. The stuff comes free with Roaster DR2, which is $300 or Tango 1.5, which goes for $1,000.
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE... CLIPPER III
Three years after the Clipper Chip was laughed off the political horizon, the White House is attempting to revive encryption control efforts under the unoffical label Clipper III. In this version, the US presidency promises to remove upper limits on the strength of encryption exports in exchange for an encryption key to be escrowed with a third party.
The Clinton administration proposes that companies could export 64-bit software encryption and 80-bit hardware encryption as long as they agree to escrow keys to decode the communications. Federal authorities could access the keys with a search warrant for digital wiretapping. The odds are unlikely the escrow requirement would last, if the momentum against it persists. A Pro-Code bill introduced in the Senate by Republican senator Conrad Burns of Montana and backed by the likes of Bob Dole and Vermont's Patrick Leahy calls for all encryption strength guidelines to be removed from export policy. It prohibits mandatory key escrow, although it does give the Secretary of Commerce the abiltiy to bar sales to foreign military.
Mindful of the sometimes unwieldy federal security standards, the bill forbids Commerce and its National Institute of Standards and Technology body to "promulgate, or enforce regulations, or otherwise adopt standards or carry out policies that result in encryption standards for useby businesses or entries other than Federal computer systems." epic.org, www.nsa.gov:8080 o
IDENTITY CRISIS - WHAT USE ARE DIGITAL IDS?
With all these Java and ActiveX applets flying around the net, it's important to know who you're corresponding with, hence the popularity of digital signatures. Anyone relying on Versign's beta Class 1 Netscape-compatible certificates at the moment, should be aware that they say very little about identity.
The problem was highlighted at www.digicrime.com, a tongue-in-cheek Web site run by Kevin McCurley, a cryptography researcher at the US Sandia National Laboratories. He quite simply requested idents with the e-mail of root@localhost and a few others, and was given them. The fact that no checking of the e-mail address took place puzzled and worried him. Subsequently, other users have applied for and have also received IDs with identical addresses.
In fact, the guys at VeriSign say that this is down to a glitch in the beta system - and a system of mail-back e-mail verification will be in place by the time that Netscape 3.0 is released commercially.
Even though the finished Class 1 system may allay McCurley's fears, there are more-fundamental problems that have to be overcome by all identification systems. For example VeriSign's Class 2 certificates are meant to confer a higher level of veracity, by cross-checking the applicant's identity with the Equifax credit checking agency. The even more stringent Class 3 IDs need papers signed by a notary. But as McCurley says "I have a colleague who got a credit card offer mailed to her dead cat after it was signed up for AOL. I wonder how reliable the Equifax database is. Class 3 requires a notary. I wonder if a dead cat can become a notary?"
VeriSign itself takes a pragmatic approach and says it will make absolutely clear to users the level of confidence they can have in the various certificates. It is currently also working on ways to offer Class 2 and 3 certification outside of the US and Canada; the company is working with the International Chamber of Commerce which is currently mulling the problem. In Europe, a lot of the traditional postal offices are also getting involved in the digital ident game. VeriSign reckons it should be able to issue the first non US/Canada class 2 licenses later this year.
www.verisign.com o
EDIFY INTROS ELECTRONIC BANKING SYSTEM
Edify Corporation, a newly public start-up that made a big splash on the stock market after Visa endorsed its technology, has introduced its Internet-based Electronic Banking System. Edify EBS combines Web banking services with more-traditional electronic banking over telephones, fax and financial management software like Intuit's Quicken. The first release will include home banking, bill payment, dynamic target marketing, personal profile, message center and custoemr service teleconferencing modules. It will sell its technology to banks at the hefty price tag of $195,000 starting this summer.
www.edify.com o
FORRESTER POURS COLD WATER OVER NCS
The new breed of $500 Internet network terminals will not be good enough to satisfy consumer demand, according to US analysts Forrester Research.
"Although the vision of millions of consumers using cheap, low-overhead Internet devices is seductive to content providers and advertisers, the device won't deliver," says the report. Senior analyst Josh Bernoff claims "the technology is not good enough, the content will be inadequate, and distribution will pose a substantial hurdle. There are other ways to get on-line that are better investments long-term."
The report points out that most successful consumer electronic products deliver easy defined value at prices around or below $200. Web appliances are priced too high, and only display the most basic HTML pages, not the 3D graphics or virtual reality that would compel consumers to buy the products.
The terminals may find more favour with information system managers, at least according to rival researchers IDC, which has found that 15% of IS managers feel they are viable. But even IDC, which splits the Internet access device market into six parts, claims that such devices will pose no threat to PCs for at least 5 years. o
WORLDWIDE DESKTOP UNIT SHIPMENTS FOR THE YEAR 2000
PCs (general purpose) 76.4%
Internet PCs 2.6%
Internet terminals 3.2%
Set top boxes 6.0%
DICE* 11.8%
*Digital interactive consumer electronic machines
Source:Forrester Research
HP has launched HP Depot/J, a warehouse-style toolset that lets Java developers deploy business rules and legacy objects in applications. It includes a browser to select the objects, an engine that converts them to Java-aware objects and development tools for placing them in Java applications.
The pieces of Depot/J were known internally as Cream and Sugar, names that HP legal quashed. Computer Reseller News erroneously stated that Cream and Sugar would convert Java into ActiveX, C++ and other objects, a role HP said was never intended for the product. www.hp.com o
COMPUSERVE: OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE WEB
CompuServe became the latest in a string of online services to abandon its proprietary environment and move to the Internet, raising issues of how it will maintain its profit margins. CompuServe follows Microsoft, Prodigy and AT&T in switching to the Internet, leaving only America Online clinging to its closed environment despite making AOL services available on the Web.
CompuServe said its Internet plan, code named Red Dog, will create a suite of services available via a standard Web browser by year-end. The H&R Block spin-out claims its development costs will decrease because it will be able to buy more content instead of designing it in-house; it will soon be able to bring product to market 75% faster.
The company is still developing the authorization technology to monitor and charge customers accessing CompuServe from Web browsers. CompuServe, which gets most of its revenue from subscriber fees, admitted it will need more advertisers to keep profits up under Red Dog. The company thinks users are still afraid or unable to navigate the Web quickly and so its proprietary scheme will pick up new customers on that basis. CompuServe will continue to support its proprietary CompuServe Information Management service for as long as there is customer interest. o
MFS & UUNET UNVEIL AGRESSIVE ROAMING PLANS
MFS Communications Co Inc's proposed $2bn purchase of UUNet Technologies has, if anything speeded up the two behemoths separate plans to provide global service. MFS announced late last week that it intends to create a series of Internet Service Provider (ISP) interconnect facilities across Europe, on the same lines as the large Metropolitan Access Exchanges (MAEs) that it already has in the US.
First on the shopping list is Paris where MFS says it has already reached agreement to provide a number of (unamed) Internet Service Providers with an interconnect facility. The Paris facility will be joined by others, most probably in the European cities where MFS already has a network presence (London, Frankfurt, Stockholm and Zurich). The company gave no time-
scales for the development.
Meanwhile UUNet's ISP buying spree have begun to bear fruit with the announcement of an international roaming service in 92 cities in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. Next month Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Singapore, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong will be added to the list. Users will be charged $6 per hour surcharge.
The service will expand; UUnet claims to have local access in 288 cities outside the US. Over the last six months the company has announced a planned investment in AUNET Corporation; a joint venture with the Taiwanese government to provide Internet services in Asia; acquired a majority interest in UUNET Canada purchased Pipex in the UK and bought 40% of Eunet Germany.
Under the terms of the merge-over Microsoft is trading its 13% stake in UUNet for 4% in MFS. o
INTEL GETS INTO JAVA
Never one to miss out on a party for long, Intel is abandoning its perceived detachment from the Java crowd by creating media extensions to Java that may work into the next version of the language.
Intel is showing extensions for local and streaming audio/video, "3D audio" and animation this week at JavaOne. Intel is not a Java licensee, but says its media plans build on top of the language and don't require a license. Intel's Java product manager Chris Rotvik said that they will add function to the "media poor" Java 1.0 while working to see that they become part of the core media API being defined by Sun, Intel, Silicon Graphics and Macromedia for Java 1.1.
Rotvik said Intel wants to give customers "the performance on the Internet that they're accustomed to seeing on their PCs." Intel will support the media characteristics on its own platform natively; while Rotvik claimed the move isn't "an interesting way to make money in the Intel/Java space," it's perhaps not coincidental or out of character that such support will make those extensions work better on Intel platforms than any other.
The software-only pieces arose from the same Intel initiatives that created MMX and Indeo. The media extensions are likely to become product, but Intel's ing out how making them a product would affect its API partners.
Intel's "realistic sound experience" extension features what Intel calls 3D audio, which responds to direction and proximity cues and could emulate an approaching jet, for example. It's already being worked into VRML. The animation extension features an object-oriented engine that in future Java releases will be placed in the Java core to smooth out sometimes crude animation and enable complex sequences. It performs "2 1/2D," essentially 2D planes stacked to give animations more depth.
The audio and video media classes focus on data streaming and playback. They build on the ITU standard H.263 and G.723 video and voice-quality codecs and support MIDI and .WAV protocols as wells as Intel's own Indeo.
www.intel.com/iaweb/internet.htm o
Business@Web, the Internet start-up that netted former SAP America president Klaus Besier as CEO, has signed a two-part agreement to move human resources giant PeopleSoft to the Internet. Business@Web will extend PeopleSoft's key applications to the Internet in phase one of the agreement, with phase two calling for it to port its Open Extensions programming interface to the PeopleSoft platform so future applications developed will be Internet-enabled o
02'S JAVA-DATABASE LINK
French object database company O2 Technology Inc will announce its promised support for Java at the JavaOne development conference this week with Java interfaces for relational and object databases. From September it will offer an interface allowing developers to store Java applets in relational or object databases. O2 says its runtime sits atop the low-level JavaSoft JDBC API and doesn't require the programmer to know the structure of the relational database being used.
Currently the Java support offered by relational vendors requires the developer to write a mapper to map Java objects to relational rows and tables. The interface provides automatic generation of the database schema from the Java schema and also interfaces to existing C++ and Smalltalk interfaces. o
DOT GOSSIP
Compaq is gearing up to restructure and position itself for the Internet, essentially putting its Web servers in the Systems Division, with the rest of the Internet pieces to fall under a yet-to-be-defined Internet group. Meanwhile, Compaq reportedly has over 20 Internet investments and research initiatives underway.
Commenting on its Web-domination plan, (page 1) NCR sources say they expect little competition from the competing Tuxedo TP system, claiming that BEA Systems hasn't the resources or the mentality to go after the enterprise. Encina is about the closest. IBM isn't expected to make CICS Internet capable until next year.
Hewlett Packard reckons that it has the worlds largest Intranet with 1,600 Web servers and Netscape Navigator sitting on more than 70,000 desktops.
Playboy Enterprises Inc set new advertising rates for space on its Playboy Web site - www.playboy.com - and signed six new advertisers for the space: new prices range from $1,250 to $26,250 per hyperlink per month, based on a cost-per-impression rate structure.
MFS Communications Co Inc is effusive about its hot new Metropolitan Area Network in Paris, except for one aspect, where it gets very coy, saying the backbone network "has been laid through Les Egouts de Paris - the city's underground network of utility tunnels." Well yes, but actually they're the sewers.
With regard to the unusual levels of cooperation established during development of the seven new Java APIs (see page 2), JavaSoft's Jon Kannegaard said the individual companies will "bury the hatchet" until the API's finished, then go build their products and clobber each other.
The Federal Election Commission has refused CompuServe's offer to grant free Internet access to political candidates during the election year, ruling that such a gift violates the ban on corporate donations to candidates.
Although Netscape is readying Navigator 3.0 for release this quarter with Java support for the Mac, it's yet to release Java for Windows 3.1. It's supposed to have a 3.0 beta with Java and JavaScript on the Microsoft platform before the end of June.
A tiny Internet service provider called Log On America is taking CompuServe to court in a dispute over the company's logo, which features a globe superimposed on a computer screen, as does CompuServe's. The suit follows a May 1 letter from CompuServe which accused the Providence, Rhode Island company of trademark infringement. Log On America claims the two logos are different enough to invalidate the complaint. The suit asks for unspecified damages, a jury trial and a judgement that the ISP isn't liable for infringement.
The brash online journal Suck, deriding the fantasy of profits in the Internet business, quoted a Berkley professor who showed the way words break down on the Web: applications are now applets, and profits are now the pits.
Network Intensive, a division of consulting firm Compute Intensive, is shipping a turnkey Internet firewall gateway aimed at small business. InterCept is configured for Web, FTP, mail and news serving. It's available direct.
JavaSoft's Kona has now been dubbed JavaOS, but it seems that JavaSoft is having a hard time adjusting to the new name. As are we.
Microsoft has released a free downloadable ActiveX animation player for PowerPoint capable of displaying Shockwave-type animation. It's only a reader. A new animation add-on for PowerPoint 95 is necessary to create animation sequences.
Netscape is planning a dial-up version of Navigator for the Mac with a built-in PPP stack. It's reportedly outsourced the stack work to a start-up called Rockstar Studios Inc, best known for its FreePPP shareware.
Stand by for more Web-server perform-ance wars. Client/Server Labs, the people behind RPMark95 and RPM/dbs, say they will have an Intranet benchtest ready in July.
In a sign of the times ParcPlace-Digitalk, the unofficial home of that other object language, has launched a program to incorporate Java into its Smalltalk-based product line. It will roll out in July Parts for Java, a visual development tool that includes a browser, a toolset and an editor for Java classes. www.parcplace.com
CMP Publications' Network Computing injected a doomsday note in a recent article claiming an Internet meltdown if its routing and infrastructure issues aren't resolved soon. It quotes a senior Sprint engineer who says that if we "just let things go," the Internet could be nonfunctional within five to 10 months. The remedies include the costly process of renumbering networks and fees for addresses and routing.
Talking of the death of the Net, White Pines Software's CU-SeeMe video-conferencing package is often pilloried because of the way it sprays UDP packets around. A new version of the reflector is said to cure this, introducing bandwith monitoring for the first time.
Digital Equipment rolled out the first of its AltaVista products with a mail server that can integrate with applications like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. The NT-based server can also send multimedia documents across the Internet. www.altavista.software.digital.com
Microsoft is sending Internet Explorer 3.0 to public beta this week with the obligatory support for Java, JavaScript and animated GIFs. In fact, it accidentally made copies available a couple of weeks early when someone in Redmond set permissions on the server incorrectly, letting surfers get away with some early copies, as the excellent www.browserwatch.com site noted. o
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