Netscape coins "crossware" -- What does it mean for Java?
Day one of Netscape’s latest developer’s conference opened with a pregnant pause that eventually gave birth to the familiar baby face of Marc Andreessen. True to form, most of the engineer attendees (including this guilty programmer-cum-correspondent) failed to arrive on time for the 9 a.m. opening keynote, forcing delays as we queued up for the registration cattle call. Moo… Moo… Moooooooo…
As the last of the late risers meandered into the main exhibit hall around half past nine, aural corporal punishment for our tardiness ensued as we were forced to endure a synthesized serenade of selections from the “Obnoxious Internet Trade Show Tunes” CD, Volume 1. Finally, reprieve was granted, the volume was trimmed, the lights dimmed, and Andreessen, Netscape’s pudgy wunderkind, strolled onto the stage.
Netscape’s indefatigable senior vice president of technology and conference circuit warrior delivered what must be his 1,237th keynote address this morning. Experience has made this guy’s delivery as cool as the other side of the pillow. Rattling off acronym jumbles that would tie lesser tongues, Andreessen painted Netscape’s vision for the future of software, dubbed crossware.
Crossware promises cross-platform, cross-network, cross-enterprise software built for the borderless marketplace of tomorrow. Based on Netscape’s ONE (Open Network Environment), crossware will be the product of engineers and IT planners armed with a toolbox full of open standards, protocols, languages, and tools brought together under a coherent blueprint. The interoperability of crossware will tie businesses together through extranets and enable a compelling array of strategic customer service solutions. So says Netscape Communications Corp.
Crossware: Cross-hairs or crossed fingers? Is crossware a loaded cannon brought to bear against Microsoft’s captive strategy and endless resources, or just a few slides of “marketecture” conjured to buy time in the mind- and market-share battle with the Redmond juggernaut?
The primary composite technologies of crossware include HTTP, SSL, JavaBeans, dynamic HTML, JavaScript, CORBA/IIOP, Java, LDAP, S/MIME, and X.509 certificates. Individually, each of these pieces appeals to me more than the available alternatives, so, yes, I buy into the complete crossware puzzle. As with all things electronic, however, the devil is in the details. Introducing and integrating all of this relatively young technology into global enterprise will take some time and elbow grease (and money).
To its credit, Netscape acknowledges this and is making moves to make the pieces fit together more smoothly. Last week, Netscape, IBM, Oracle, and SunSoft submitted a paper to the Object Management Group that proposes a bridge between CORBA and JavaBeans that clears up some of the potential redundancies between the two frameworks. With JavaSoft’s absorption of Netscape’s Internet Foundation Classes into the JDK’s Java Foundation Classes, and Netscape’s embrace of JavaBeans this week (more on this in a moment), it appears Sun and Netscape are once again chummy bedmates, heading off potentially dangerous bickering between these industry co-pilots. Most importantly, mature development tools are now emerging for building, managing, and evolving this primordial ooze of technology.
At the very least, Netscape’s strategy has been consistent over the past few Internet years, which should shore up the confidence of decision makers sitting tentatively on the fence waiting for some of the dust to settle. With few exceptions, the futurevision painted by Andreessen at DevCon this morning was almost a duplicate of that presented last October in New York at Netscape’s Internet Developer’s Conference.
Netscape buys into Beans
Netscape (and Sun) made much ado this week over the adoption of JavaBeans as the component model of choice throughout the Netscape client and server architecture. The only surprising aspect of this announcement, if there was any surprise at all, was that it came so late in the component model wars. After all, did anyone expect Netscape to tumble under the covers with Microsoft and ActiveX?
So what does tight JavaBeans integration in Netscape really mean? First, Netscape may be end-of-lifing, or at least renaming, its LiveConnect intercomponent communication model. Netscape announced BeanConnect, an inter-JavaBean communication mechanism available to JavaBean developers. BeanConnect enables communication among multiple JavaBeans on the same HTML page (or even across multiple HTML pages) without having to write JavaScript glue code. This could replace the kludgy, undocumented inter-applet communication mechanisms like static variable semaphores that Java developers have been relying upon thus far.
BeanConnect also will allow JavaBeans to serve as HTML form elements, enabling rich user interface widgets to be integrated quickly into page-based applications. All we’ll have to do is include an <INPUT TYPE="object" NAME="beanname"> tag inside a FORM element; upon form submission, BeanConnect will introspect the JavaBean and pass the desired variable values as normal CGI data to the Web server. Details on BeanConnect can be found in the Resources section of this article.
On the business end of things, Netscape’s adoption of JavaBeans should provide a significant boost to the JavaBean component market. Ask any sunken-eyed heroin addict how it all started and they’ll tell you about their relatively innocent days of smoking doobies with their buddies after school. In similar ways, HTML is the gateway drug of choice for would-be Java developers. However, most HTMLniks realize soon into their Java baptism that it is a real programming environment that requires real engineering talent to master; many lack the technical background required to climb the Java learning curve. Netscape’s JavaBean embrace will bring Java to the plug-and-play, drag-and-drop masses as sophisticated page authoring tools like Visual JavaScript (Netscape), Java Studio (SunSoft), and Drumbeat (Elemental) come to maturity. More information on these products can be found in the Resources section.
Netscape also plans to provide access to all of the services in its server suite through JavaBean components. This will save Java programmers the trouble of writing to the API or protocol of each service directly. For example, a Netscape Directory Server JavaBean will expose directory lookup services without requiring knowledge of the underlying LDAP protocol. An SMTP JavaBean will allow quick integration of mail services into a page of HTML.
Open, open, open
Every time I go to a Netscape gig, I can’t help but recall those annoying Mervyn’s TV commercials with that pathetic woman pressing her nose against the glass, chanting, “open, open, open.” Yes, yes, Marc, we get the picture already. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t already sold on the idea of creating massively distributed, globally interoperable solutions.
Ranting aside, this installment of DevCon was a success for Netscape, despite the lack of any groundshaking announcements or product debuts. The emperor of the Web kingdom does indeed have clothes, and they ain’t too shabby.
