With Communicator and Open Network Environment (ONE), Netscape focuses on complete solutions
In midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from Broadway’s Cats, Netscape held opening night for an entirely different sort of show.
In a Tuesday press conference, Netscape announced its next wave of products, Communicator 1.0 and SuiteSpot 3.0, that promise groupware with the sizzle and simplicity of the Web.
The press conference was held in conjunction with the Netscape Internet Developers’ Conference being held this week at the New York Hilton & Towers. Netscape throws a pretty good show, sporting free CDs, T-shirts, sodas, and all the other things that make life worth living. Over 3,000 propeller heads from around the world were in attendance for Wednesday’s keynote address by Marc Andreesen. Refreshingly absent from the crowd were the throngs of cellphone-toting, Armani-wearing fat guys in suits so prevalent at this year’s previous Internet events. (Are they out of money?)
Andreesen, Netscape’s VP of Technology, served up another characteristically flaccid keynote outlining the new product offerings and sketched Netscape’s roadmap for the future. Despite the Nytol-ish charisma of Netscape’s smarmy wunderkind, the presentation was a marked success. The unveiling of new features in Netscape’s flagship client software met with great favor, as did a comprehensive tour of Netscape’s Open Network Environment (ONE).
Communicator
Though not explicitly stated, it appears that with Communicator (previously codenamed Galileo) Netscape is dropping the Navigator moniker from the next release of its client software. With the name swap comes a commensurate growth in scope.
New or significantly enhanced features include secure Netscape Mail (supporting certificate-based encryption and authentication), Netscape Conference (for WebPhone-ish Internet audioconferencing), Netscape Calendar (providing online meeting scheduling and conflict resolution), Collabra (for distributed document and discussion group management), and Netscape Composer (supplanting the ‘Gold’ HTML composition features in previous Navigator releases).
Under the hood, Communicator will support an array of new protocols and standards. LDAP directory service support has been added for finding individuals on the Internet/intranet, as has RTSP (real-time streaming protocol) support, which enables live audio and video, even at low bandwidths. Despite controversy in the open standards community, Netscape continues to amend the HTML standard as it sees fit, this time adding support for layers, absolute positioning, and JavaScriptable style sheets. In deference to the massive installed base of Microsoft Office, Netscape will add plug-ins for viewing Word and Excel documents, as well as tight integration with these applications. Support for Microsoft’s ActiveX will also be rolled into Communicator.
Symantec, who presented a preview of its “Java for Dummies” Visual Cafe IDE, was quite happy to announce that Netscape is dropping Borland’s Java Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler in favor of the speedier Symantec JIT. The newly tuned Symantec JIT reportedly outperforms Borland’s by 25 percent.
The darling of the keynote presentation was Macromedia’s Fireworks Java API, which will be rolled into Communicator’s Java runtime environment. Borrowing heavily from Macromedia’s Director codebase, Fireworks enables efficient, complex two-dimensional image rendering and animation effects in Java applets. As a side benefit, Fireworks allows encapsulation of Netscape plug-ins inside of Java applets and applications, enabling, for example, a Director movie to be embedded in a Java frame. In a cliched word, Fireworks looks awesome.
SuiteSpot
On the server side of the house, SuiteSpot 3.0 is being expanded to include Media, Messaging, Certificate, and Directory servers. These enhancements correlate directly to the new features on the client, making a double-upgrade attractive but not essential for shops already invested in Netscape technology.
Working closely with Visigenic, Netscape has gotten CORBA-smart, and has added IIOP support throughout ONE’s plumbing, enabling multiplatform distributed object services. The recent launch of LiveWire-based LivePayment offers a simple architecture for electronic commerce. SuiteSpot’s Directory, Messaging, and Certificate servers promise to deliver a tightly-integrated, secure communications infrastructure.
Now that Collabra’s groupware interfaces are tightly integrated on the client, the sophisticated knowledge management features of this software should begin to bear fruit. The ability to customize the behavior of messaging agents via server-side Internet Foundation Classes (IFCs) make SuiteSpot a powerful and versatile solution for managing workflow in the enterprise.
You can’t fight in here, this is the war room
Though Andreesen and Netscape paid loud lip service to open standards and simpler integration with third-party tools, the theme of Netscape’s strategy for next 6 months rings with clarity: “We are your one-stop shop for the intranet.”
Rather than continuing its futile try at outsmarting Microsoft with whizzy features, Netscape is attempting to outflank its competitor by offering a comprehensive solutions-based environment. The Netscape ONE unveiled here in New York definitely ups the ante. Your play, Redmond.
Day Two: `Who run Bartertown?’
Day Two of the conference ran smoothly, though it is sometimes difficult to discern if this “developers'” conference is intended to be a three-day posedown for Netscape marketing or a hands-on conference for actual, er, um, developers.
Anecdotally, throughout one of today’s Programming Practices sessions outlining the newly minted Netscape/Intel CDSA crytpo API, the Marketing Guy repeatedly and rudely interrupted the Guy That Really Knew What He Was Talking About. Almost too well-kempt, articulate, and polished to be trusted, Netscape’s marketing folks demonstrate masterful memorization of industry catch-phrases like “open standard,” “platform neutrality,” and “extensible framework,” but leave a bit to be desired in the usable information category. It’s like the DNA of Steve Wozniak and Tony Robbins got into a skirmish, and the Personal Power genes won.
Though one could easily dismiss such annoyances as a distasteful but unavoidable byproduct of the gross commercialization of our trade, I found myself fighting back the Walter Mitty in me, who wanted to leap onto the shoulders of the nearest tall guy and snarl, “Who Run Bartertown!?!”
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Cool Toys
AT&T Wireless Services and Unwired Planet reserved the Hilton’s 44th floor Presidential Suite to showcase their PocketNet/UP.Link technology. These slick little devices combine the functionality and form factor of a cellular phone with the convenience of a “browser” that acts as a superthin client for packet-switched wireless applications. Reference applications include stock quotes, email, headline news, and FedEx package tracking.
Unwired Planet’s HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language) derives its syntax from the familiar HTML, but adds a compilation step that tokenizes the plaintext to compressed pseudocode for transmission on the (un)wire. Client requests can be routed through Internet gateways to server-side CGI/NSAPI/ISAPI processes that return compiled HDML to the browser. Using this feature, “Web-scraping” parsers can be built that glean and distill information from Web-based services for viewing on the phone’s tiny but usable 3×12 LCD display.
The PocketNet concept hearkens back to the early days of client/server, when integrators wrapped GUIs around screen-scrapes of legacy mainframe applications. This is AT&T’s second try at wireless information services. Let’s hope AT&T has better luck with PocketNet that it did with its recently canned Personalink service for Sony/General Magic’s Magic Link PDA.
Secret Agent Man
Speaking of the devil (just ask former shareholders), General Magic appears to be making another go of things with its Tabriz AgentWare and Agent Tools, both on exhibit here at NIDC. Now in its fifth year of business, this progeny of Apple, Sony, Motorola, and AT&T has impressively regrouped after the disappointing lack of market acceptance of its super-cool, albeit proprietary, Magic Cap operating system.
This time around, General Magic is opening up, offering free Tabriz SDKs to any developer with a pulse and a business card. Tabriz leverages GM’s Telescript agent specification language to form a foundation for creating intelligent agents that aim to tame Internet information overload. Using Telescript, agents can be built to scour the Web for tidbits of information — stock prices, the lowest airfares, 49ers tickets, etc. These automated dataminers can be told to notify their human owners via email or page when certain nuggets of information are gleaned from the mother lode.
Though General Magic insists that Telescript and Java are complementary tools, JavaSoft’s Jeeves API will enable similar functionality for Java. Ideally, both types of agents will be able to coexist through CORBA’s IIOP or a glue protocol to be named later.
Day Three: You might be a nethead…
The third and final day of Netscape’s Internet Developers’ Conference opened with a rousing address from Sun’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Eric Schmidt. An ardent proponent of network-centric computing for many years, Schmidt was instrumental in Sun’s Java initiative. Each time I hear Eric Schmidt speak, the “I told you so” in his demeanor becomes increasingly palpable, and rightly so — Schmidt is a visionary of the first order.
The Friday talk began with a few of those ubiquitous “Internet: Exponential Growth” slides we’ve all seen dozens, if not hundreds, of times. (Presentation authoring tool vendors should seriously consider bundling these slides in a template.) Schmidt picked up the pace from there, eloquently portraying the economic and cultural shifts triggered by the Internet phenomena.
Schmidt likens Xerox’s epochal enabling of infinite duplication in the 1960’s to Netscape’s enabling of infinite variety in the 1990’s. Our parents had their “Summer of ’69”; we have been fortunate enough to participate in the birth of an information revolution at least as significant as the invention of the Gutenburg press.
Schmidt envisions a massively-connected futureworld that might be disturbing to some. For instance, Schmidt discusses a society in which each citizen will wear as many as five IP-addressable devices on his body. (To steal a line from Jeff Foxworthy, if you hear something like this and think, “cool,” you might be a nethead.)
Quick Solutions
A variety of exhibitors in the Technology Pavilion were showing third-generation tools that promise rapid solutions to specific Internet/intranet challenges. Systems integrators often confront the “build it or buy it” question when integrating solutions. In the past, the immaturity of the Internet tools market has forced integrators to settle on the side of “build it” more than we would have liked. Verity’s SEARCH’97 and iCat’s Electronic Commerce Suite promise to change this.
Quick Search
Verity previewed components of their SEARCH’97 information retrieval platform, which enables rapid deployment of corporate document repositories and other search-reliant applications. Built around Verity’s proven search engine, the SEARCH’97 suite will provide a solid framework for deploying many of the applications systems integrators are now developing from scratch. By leveraging SEARCH’97 as an off-the-shelf foundation, integrators get the bells and whistles of the architecture for free.
SEARCH’97 provides for inline viewing of a variety of document types (Verity claims support for over 200 formats, including SGML, PDF, and Postscript). Content from heterogeneous sources, including Lotus Notes, Documentum, Sybase, Oracle, ODI, and Objectivity, can be indexed and accessed from the same Web-based client. Agents can be constructed to monitor the repository and to notify users when a particular document is modified or deleted. Verity’s search engine supports advanced query technologies like query by example and natural language processing.
In sum, SEARCH’97 looks like a winner.
Quick Sell
iCat Corporation was on hand at NIDC to show their turnkey Electronic Commerce Suite. Using iCat’s Commerce Publisher and Commerce Exchange, sophisticated online catalogs can be built and deployed in a matter of days. Commerce Publisher offers a variety of catalog templates that require no previous Internet authoring experience to use. A simple import of a product hierarchy into Commerce Publisher creates the catalog pages based on the chosen template.
Once the catalog is deployed on the Internet, Commerce Exchange provides a simple shopping-cart metaphor for customers to select their order. Commerce Exchange supports both SSL and secure-HTTP for secure transmission of payment options. Integration with Checkfree and First Virtual completes iCat’s transaction support.
With successful reference deployments at high-volume vendors like Office Deport and Amway, iCat’s e-commerce solution appears to scale well. Besides the traditional online catalog service, iCat’s suite could also provide rudimentary EDI between suppliers and retailers over a virtual private network. If you need e-commerce on the quick, iCat’s Electronic Commerce Suite deserves serious consideration.
