Online publishers cookin’ carefully with Java

It seems the hype around Java is starting to resemble those late-night TV ads for the V-Slicer.

It slices, it dices – it’s the one tool that can do just about anything in the kitchen. Likewise, hype around Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Java would have you believe that it is the only programming language needed to whip up spicy animations and every form of applet on the Web.

But according to a few experienced Web chefs, there’s a time and a place place to cook up applets with Java. And there are times when creating a Java applet for, say, a simple animation is like building a Cuisinart to chop a clove of garlic: It’s just not the easiest way to get the job done. Instead, balancing challenge and effort ensures the best return for your Web programming investment.

At the recent Sun-sponsored “Java and New Media” seminar at the Seybold Seminars in Boston, media organizations including Hearst’s New Media Center, Poppe.Com, and Time Inc. New Media showed off their latest Java applications and talked about their plans for the future. Here are some of the examples and advice the speakers, or their colleagues, offer to their publishing peers.

Terence Collins — The Hearst Corporation

Hearst, which publishes consumer magazines like Good Housekeeping and Popular Mechanics, is utilizing and prototyping Java at three levels according to Terence Collins, Web Producer at Hearst’s New Media Center: as a zippy extension to HTML, as a way of packaging content to run on the user’s machine instead of on the server, and as a way of delivering live information.

Take, for example, Hearst’s multimedia news page (http://mmnews.com). Collins’ group spiced up the page with three simple Java applets: a ticker scrolling a message to tease a hyperlinked magazine at the site; an image with an attached sound bite that plays when the cursor moves into it; and a rotating billboard that links to other sites on the home page.

These simple applets could be built with other tools, such as Macromedia Inc.’s Shockwave, Collins said. But, he favors Java because “if a user is using a new browser, they’re guaranteed to see [it], whereas if [we use] Shockwave, they’ll need a plug-in.”

Still, Collins wouldn’t use Java for most types of simple animation. Netscape 2.0 supports GIF89 compression, which allows images to be animated in a single file, is less processor-intensive than Java, and creates generally smaller animations than a Java applet produces, he said. The tradeoff is the limited functionality of GIF89.

Collins advised programmers to keep in mind how their simple applets will be used. “The programmer has to think like a designer,” he said. Hearst’s simple ticker was built so that a designer who knows nothing about Java can type in a new message, change the scroll speed and color, and set up hyperlinks, all through a simple HTML tag, Collins said.

Hearst’s new media group is developing a Java applet that Collins calls a good example of a second-level application: a “sensitivity quiz” for Cosmopolitan magazine, where all the questions are packed into an applet that runs on the user’s machine, instead of fed off the server one by one.

“You could have done something like that with CGI [common gateway interface], but it would have been interminable,” Collins said. “You would have had to point and click, wait, point and click.”

Collins’ demo used a server-push model to flash graphics on the screen during the quiz — another advantage to using Java for the quiz content.

“Once you’ve downloaded a Java applet, all your content will be running locally, so you’re free to maintain a connection with the server to push through new information if you want to,” Collins said.

The third level of Java applet Hearst is developing takes advantage of Java’s ability to maintain a live stream of information over the Net: a ticker that feeds the latest information to the client. Hearst is creating such an applet for one of Hearst’s television stations, WBAL (http://www.wbaltv.com), to send out news, weather, or sports information. Since the applet can run outside the browser on the desktop, Collins said, the applet eliminates the need to click on an “update” button to display the latest information, and also frees the browser for other tasks.

Applications like this straddle the boundary between publishing and broadcasting, Collins pointed out.

“When the bandwidth is wide enough, [information] doesn’t have to be text,” Collins said. “It can be video or audio or anything else you can think of.”

Peter Adams — Poppe.Com/Poppe Tyson

At Poppe.Com, the interactive media unit of advertising firm Poppe Tyson, Java is viewed as a robust programming language for building what Peter Adams, Director, Interactive and Creative Services, called “branding applications” — Web applications that give a service to a user, and simultaneously help imprint the marketer’s brand more solidly than just “visual candy” would do.

For example, at Chrysler’s Jeep Web site (http://www.jeep.com), Poppe.Com is developing a Java applet to make price comparisons between Jeep and other cars in its class. It includes a side-by-side comparison of any options a user selects — power steering, mag wheels, and the like — and tallies the cost of the options on the bottom of the screen.

For now, the application runs using CGI forms; it offers the base sticker price but does not tally up the options, since adding up the option prices would be too unwieldy with CGI, Adams said. The Java version should be available in the next quarter, Adams said.

“You’d have to constantly resubmit the form and have it come back, and for Internet users, that’s not the most intuitive way to do it,” said Adams, who is based in the group’s New York City office. “The most intuitive way is to put a real application interface onto it and have these things happen in real time.”

At the Valvoline Web site (http://www.valvoline.com), however, Poppe.Com used Shockwave to develop a multimedia racing trivia game. The interface is highly animated — for example, users move a stick shift to get to harder questions — and the game interacts constantly with external databases at the Valvoline site to pull up questions, Adams said.

“Some things are inherently easier to do in Shockwave because of the [multimedia] authoring environment of [Macromedia’s] Director,” Adams said. “But the deeper application programming environment Java provides is a real necessity for hard-core application programming.”

Dan Woods — Pathfinder/Time Inc. New Media

Pathfinder (http://pathfinder.com) is currently using Java applets for simple Web page enhancements, such as scrolling headlines and a soon-to-be-deployed stock ticker, Dan Woods, Applications Editor, said. They are also in the middle of developing Java-based navigational tools to help users find their way around the 200,000-page Web site.

The Java navigation tools to be unveiled as part of Pathfinder’s redesign going into beta testing this quarter will also have an HTML-only counterpart — one that will, necessarily, be less useful than the Java version.

“HTML doesn’t allow the flexibility for configuring a page and delivering a new page as fast as Java,” Woods said. “[In Java], you can have a mouse float over an object and the object reacts to it, and you can have much more control of what happens on a click. In HTML, [a click] goes to a page or runs a CGI script.”

Even so, Pathfinder cannot yet rely exclusively on Java to spice up its Web pages, Woods said. Now, only about 20 percent of Pathfinder’s traffic comes from Netscape 2.0 browsers, meaning that many of their visitors are Java-less.

“Our first priority is to make applications that all the users can use,” Woods said. “Gradually, as Java becomes more accepted and widespread, we will implement more and more in Java.”

In anticipation of Java’s growth, Pathfinder is developing proprietary tools for creating Java Web applets. Off-the-shelf Java development tools will also help speed the acceptance of Java as a platform, Woods said.

If Java remains as difficult to use in Web development as it is right now, “then Java isn’t a viable platform because your average Web designers can’t write the code they need,” Woods said. “But there’s a huge amount of work going on in these development environments, so I assume they will be along this year and they will be compelling.”