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A Programmer's Personal Tour of JavaOneSM

Day Two: Comfortably Numb

By Bret Sommers, JavaWorldTM

San Francisco (April 3, 1997) -- I awoke to Day Two of JavaOneSM with excruciatingly sore shoulders, legs, and feet. In my agony, I made a mental note to make an effort to disconnect the neural shunt that shackles me to my workstation a bit more often so I can get outdoors to exercise. After a successful infusion of Tylenol and Coke, however, all traces of such nonsense evaporated and I eagerly boarded the BART train from Berkeley to Moscone for Scott McNealy's Thursday keynote.


English musician/artist
Thomas Dolby Robertson,
cofounder of Headspace,
delivered a demo of a
next-generation JavaTM audio engine

McNealy was upstaged in the morning keynote by a demo of Java's next-generation audio engine, to be comprised of technology licensed from Headspace Inc. The demo was delivered by a conspicuously accented and beret'd English musician/artist named Thomas Dolby Robertson, cofounder of Headspace. Long hours of hacking have rendered me culturally oblivious, so I had not heard of Dolby prior to the JavaSoftTM/Headspace press announcement. However, my trusty editor-in-chief informs me that he had a pop hit, "She Blinded Me With Science," back in the '80s. I was also treated to a chalk- screeching rendition of the samesaid song by the samesaid editor, though compassion compels me to spare you the .au digitization.

The Headspace engine, which has also been licensed by WebTV and Jean-Louis Gasse's Be Inc., provides for a new distributed audio format, dubbed RMF (Rich Media Format). Using Headspace, streaming RMF audio can be served from multiple servers and mixed dynamically in a 100% Pure JavaTM client with fidelity equaling or surpassing other streaming media technologies. The technology demonstration was quite impressive; it is relieving to see JavaSoft filling the gaps in the JDK's media libraries. Headspace, coupled with the forthcoming Media and 2D/3D imaging APIs and runtimes being codeveloped by Sun, SGI, and Intel, promise to make Java a viable platform for building aesthetically-juiced applications that shake the timbers and numb the senses.

Cruising the Pavilion
I spent most of Thursday afternoon lurking in the Java Pavilion, reveling in the explosion of Java product and tool vendors. Most of the "old" players are still around and thriving, like NetDynamics, Symantec, Borland, RogueWave, WebLogic, and company. A plethora of "me-too" vendors are attempting to follow the trails blazed by these pioneers, and they came out to JavaOne in droves. In the insanely competitive tools arena, where time-to-market means almost everything, it is likely that a shakeout will drive most of the copycats into other niches, or worse, into startup Never-Never Land.

Those startups that are able to carve out new market spaces are those that are most likely to flourish in the coming year. Novera, TriTeal, NCWare, and Skunk Technologies exemplify the vanguard of a new product niche that has congealed since last year's JavaOne. These "CyberOSes," or "JavaNOSes," or "virtual desktops," sit on top of the Java runtime environment and provide functions normally expected of the native operating system or companion network administration software.

The OSI Cake Thickens (Again)
Though these companies' products do not attempt to address exactly the same problem domains, their market space Venn diagrams do intersect, in that they provide overlapping services such as resource access control, directory services, and distributed desktops. In a sense, they are yet another tier inserted into the OSI model, on top of the new architecture/OS independent runtime environment layer introduced by Java over the past two years, but under the applications layer. Whether this cake-thickening is a "good thing" or a "bad thing," I defer to the marketplace to decide. It is possible that someday all of the functionality provided by this layer is subsumed by JavaSoft into the Java proper. In case you're curious, a roundup of my observations from the aforementioned vendors and their products follows.

Novera's EPIC is used in Corel's ambitious Office for Java to provide network printer- and file-sharing functions. EPIC provides a 100% Pure Java administration console for adding and deleting users and administering access to a rich variety of distributed services, including email, telnet, TN3270, file- and printer-sharing, and object-relational database access. Acting as EPIC clients, Java applets can read and write files on remote disks, print to networked printers, and perform directory service lookups, all without a drop of native code. If you've ever tried to build real productivity applications in Java, you can appreciate the value and maturity EPIC gives you out of the box. For those keeping score at home, Novera was founded in October of 1995 and has 40 employees, of which 25 are engineers. Novera is headquartered in Burlington, MA, and is funded by Matrix Capital and Charles River. See Novera in the Java Pavilion in Booth #333 or visit their web site.

NCware Technologies was on hand to demonstrate their DSManager and JDAP directory service and network management products. The DSManager console looks strikingly similar to the EPIC administration console, though not quite as mature in form or function. Like Novera, NCware has opted to use LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) for directory persistence and retrieval. In addition to providing user-profile maintenance functions, the NCware console can also display network resource topologies and SNMP-accessible diagnostics in both graphical and tree-views, a la a CA UniCenter-ish network management console. NCware also parts out its Java LDAP implementation in a product called JDAP. NCware does not go as far as EPIC in providing application-level access to distributed resources; it only provides an administration console for them. NCware is a privately funded company headquartered in Bellevue, WA. See the DSManager in action in Booth #525 or visit their web site.

Perhaps the coolest product I saw all day comes to us from TriTeal software, an established vendor of desktop integration software in the Unix world. TriTeal's SoftNC product, which has been integrated into Wyse's NC device (also on display in the JavaOne Pavilion), provides a platform-independent user interface for accessing network services and applications. Weighing in with a scant 2MB footprint (including the JVM*), TriTeal delivers a distributed desktop environment, a la Netscape's Constellation or Microsoft's Active Desktop. Using a messaging-agent architecture, a SoftNC desktop can open remote file systems, printer queues, user directories, or other network services. The SoftNC architecture is connectionless -- the desktop is notified to update by multicasting agents that poll those services for which one or more desktops have registered interest. Though the product is still in its infancy, and won't be available to the public until Summer 1997, TriTeal has made some excellent design decisions and forged strategic partnerships with the right players (Marimba, Wyse, and Fujitsu among them). For these reasons, TriTeal should become a significant player in the NC/distributed desktop space. TriTeal is a publicly-held company located in Carlsbad, CA. Of TriTeal's 140 employees, 20 engineers are on the SoftNC team. See TriTeal in Booth #236 or visit their web site.

Skunk Technologies' Entao (pronounced "endow") Open Operating Environment also attempts to provide a platform-independent windowing environment for Java applications. Several applications have already been built upon the core environment, the most impressive work having been done with multimedia applications such as streaming video. Based on my conversations with the Skunk folks, I get the feeling that they excel at writing software, but they may be biting off a bit more than a small company can chew. Rather than pursuing a winnable niche, the market focus of their efforts seems to be diluted and unclear. However, this is not to say that the company or its technology do not have superb potential, especially given the demonstrated multimedia expertise. Skunk Technologies is a privately funded company with 20 engineers, and is based in Santa Monica, California. See Entao in Booth #432 or visit their web site.

JavaOne Today show coverage is provided by JavaWorld (www.javaworld.com), IDG's monthly Web-only publication for the Java developer community.

April 3, 1997 Complete Contents

*As used on this web site, the terms "Java virtual machine" or "JVM" mean a virtual machine for the Java platform.