oration, more-intelligent clients, and programmable servers -- will go to companies that use the Internet and intranets to underpin business processes.
Tomorrow's Internet
How might this competition change the Internet in the next year? In Netscape's view, we'll all routinely send graphics and active content in e-mail, share centralized schedules with coworkers, confer with customers via local newsgroups, and find resources in directories, among other changes (see the sidebar "What to Expect from Next Year's Net").
To put this laundry list of features in perspective, let's consi
der how one business I know well -- BYTE magazine -- could use them. Netscape's vision of global groupware became real for me last year when I launched The BYTE Site. It serves three constituencies: BYTE staff, BYTE readers, and hardware and software vendors. Members of each group are scattered around the world, and they're interconnected by Web, e-mail, and conferencing applications. For example, when a reader comments on an article in our on-line archive, the site relays the message to an appropriate group of editors. When a vendor submits an electronic press release, the document moves to a private archive visible only to the magazine staff or to a public one visible to the world.
These are examples of the kinds of Internet applications that every business can use to work more effectively with its customers and suppliers. You can build them today, but there are limitations. I use e-mail as an application transport, but I would use it more extensively if I could establish secure channels. We run NNTP (N
etwork News Transfer Protocol, the protocol that links Usenet groups on the Internet) conferences publicly, but not yet privately because access controls are too primitive. We'd like to target applications to specific groups of vendors or readers, and we would if common directory and certificate services enabled us to administer these groups. We'd like to standardize on our own site's Internet mail server, and we might if our staff could easily synchronize the various machines from which it accesses that server. And I'd kill for Internet-enabled scheduling; much of the research for this story involved coordinating interview times with industry people in many time zones.
The next set of Internet standards -- including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Java, and Internet Interoperable ORB Protocol (IIOP) -- will take us into this era of global groupware. All groupware platforms will have to embrace Int
ernet standards in order to survive. For Lotus's Notes, Microsoft's Exchange, and Novell's GroupWise, the challenge is to take existing systems that in many respects already do what Netscape's next-generation products will do and reengineer them around current and emerging Internet standards.
Netscape's astonishing two-year sprint has shown its extraordinary gift for identifying and nurturing the standards on which a business-capable Internet must be built. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), and a few others powered the initial Web frenzy. This time, however, things will be different. Netscape's competitors are lining up behind the same next-generation standards, and the company now has its own installed base to move forward. What's more, the full-service Internet that Netscape envisions requires a lot more infrastructure and planning than was necessary just to fire up your corporate Web site. To those challenges, add one more: Micr
osoft has its own ideas about the future of the Internet, and any one of them could derail Netscape's plans.
By the time you read this, Netscape plans to have released a suite of client and server products that will solidify its vision of
Internet-enabled
groupware. What kinds of communication and collaboration will these products enable? How can applications developers leverage the new features on clients? On servers? I can't say for sure, because the code wasn't downloadable at press time, but here's what I've learned so far.
Communication and Collaboration
Since version 2, Navigator has actually been a suite of applications, consisting of a mailer and a newsreader as well as a browser. That suite is already a more functional groupware platform than is commonly recognized. For example, because the mailer and the newsreader automatically activate URLs, they support basic hypertext authoring. If you spell the URL correctly, you can mail me a link to the docume
nt rather than the document itself, and you can include the link in a newsgroup posting. Because the browser understands news:// URLs, ad hoc discussions created in this way can merge in Web space with formally published documents. Because these discussions can use a channel protected by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), collaboration can be private. What's more, since version 2 the mailer (though not the newsreader) can render quite a bit of HTML. That's significant not only because I can mail you in-line text and graphics, but because I can send you an HTML form wired to a script -- in other words, an application.
What can Netscape improve? Plenty. It starts with
Composer
, a simple HTML editor you can use to write e-mail messages and newsgroup postings. There are fancier HTML editors, to be sure, and even these only do what word processors have been doing for years. But it's the humble message-composition tool in mailers and newsreaders that pumps billions of words onto the Internet every
day. Composer will invite users to abandon decades-old ASCII formatting conventions and embrace styled text, colors, bulleted lists, more readable hyperlinks, and even active content. Other Internet clients will follow suit, and with any luck HTML will by year-end be well on its way toward displacing plain ASCII as the lowest common denominator for all forms of Internet content.
One of the highlights in Communicator (see the sidebar "Internet Communicator par Excellence") is a directory lookup that uses the
new address book
(shared by the mail, news, and calendar clients) to fetch names from two sources. One is a private corporate directory running on Netscape's directory server. The other is Four11, a public Web-based service that supports e-mail-address lookups. To an Internet newcomer, this would seem completely unremarkable. Didn't the Internet always work this way? Well no, actually, it did not, and it still does not, but it will soon thanks in large part to Netscape's aggressiv
e sponsorship of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) standard.
A few years back, AT&T and Novell proposed an alternative, business-grade Internet built around the NetWare Directory Service (NDS). It didn't fly for lots of reasons, including the requirement for a global, singly rooted NDS tree. This top-down model was antithetical to the organic ferment that powers the Internet's growth. LDAP, by contrast, encourages a bottom-up approach. "We'll have our subsidiary companies manage their own independent directories," says Laird Popkin, director of technology and architecture for The News Corporation's Internet services division, "then use LDAP replication to mirror everything up to an umbrella corporate directory." Companies can build LDAP servers from scratch or wrap an LDAP interface around existing directories. Four11 president Mike Santullo says it took less than a week to LDAP-enable his service.
With Communicator's S/MIME-capable mailer, I can send you a message that's encrypted
and digitally signed. Encryption means that no one but you can read it; I've scrambled the message using your public key, and only your private key can unscramble it. Digital signature ensures that no one but me could have written the message. I've attached a digest of the message that's been scrambled with my private key. Your system can unscramble the digest using my public key, then generate a fresh message digest; if the two digests match, the signature checks. There's nothing new here -- Lotus Notes users, for example, have been able to do these things for years. What is new is the notion of inviting tens of millions of Internet users to routinely apply public-key cryptographic methods. This scenario raises two enormous challenges for the future.
First, the infrastructure challenge. Who will operate the directories in which we look up each other's certificates and keys? Who will manage the certificate authorities that bind public keys to identities? Netscape has recently shipped directory and certifi
cate servers that handle these chores at the corporate level. VeriSign runs an Internet-wide certification service. Four11 plans to host directories for companies that wish to outsource directory service; it's possible because Netscape's LDAP rides on SSL, which ensures traveling the Internet securely. Companies that commit to a public-key infrastructure will have to figure out what these solutions entail, and in what combinations to deploy them.
Second, the useability challenge. Among the remarkable achievements of Navigator was the way in which it made one form of public-key cryptography -- an SSL-secured session between a browser and a Web server -- absolutely trivial to use. You just click on an https:// (the
s
stands for secure HTTP) link and bingo: The iconic key heels, a blue border appears, and you can type your credit-card number into a secure form. Will it be possible to achieve the same level of simplicity in operations such as S/MIME encryption and signing, which require people to hav
e and use private keys? "Yes, with smartcards," says Andreessen. Before that's a widespread option, though, Communicator and other secure Internet clients will have to teach us all how to use cryptographic keys and certificates. A security advisor embedded in Communicator is one of the ways Netscape is tackling this problem.
Evolution or Revolution?
Making secure collaboration pervasive requires a quantum leap in how we use the Internet. There are compelling reasons to make that leap. Once you've distributed client certificates to everyone on your Netscape intranet, for example, they'll be able to log on once to access permitted resources on all SuiteSpot 3.0 mail, news, Web, and directory servers. Secure e-mail can flow within and across corporate boundaries; that's useful not only for interpersonal communication but also for e-mail-based commercial transactions. If you host public discussions, you can protect yourself against forged and libelous postings.
The benefits are substa
ntial, but so is the effort and cost to migrate from a username/password model to a cryptographic certificate system. "Netscape doesn't have a huge legacy to support," says Chris Allen, president of Consensus, an SSL toolkit provider, "so they'd like to move to a complete certificate world very quickly." Microsoft, he points out, favors a more evolutionary approach. Internet Explorer can, for example, securely authenticate to Internet Information Server using the Windows NT challenge/response protocol to transmit the client's password securely. "Customer requirements and convenience make passwords useful," adds Consensus' lead developer Tim Dierks. "Let's not be cryptosnobs. CompuServe has jillions of users with passwords. They see a huge cost in deploying certs."
NNTP-based conferences running locally at sites such as netscape.com and microsoft.com enable thousands of developers to pool knowledge and exchange views. As valuable as these conferences are, though, they leave a lot to be desired. Users can't
search them, categorize them, or reorganize their views of them. The developers Netscape got when it acquired Collabra have now addressed these limitations. Netscape's forthcoming Collabra client and server are not simply Collabra Share with a Netscape label. They're a long-overdue and much-needed next generation of NNTP technology. The client manipulates views of the message base in ways that will remind you (not accidentally) of Lotus Notes. It can also now work off-line, as Forte's, Microsoft's, and others' newsreaders have done for some time.
Collabra Server comes with a full-text indexer and a sophisticated access control mechanism. To support the new features, Netscape has proposed extensions to NNTP and submitted these to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval. It's nice to see this venerable protocol moving forward. NNTP conferences are an increasingly popular mode of collaboration. When operated locally -- that is, apart from the regular Usenet -- these discussions create documents th
at can have long-term value to your business. Netscape's new Collabra tools will help you organize and manage those documents.
Programmable Client
First-generation Web technology was compelling to groupware developers because you could deploy applications to users anywhere in the world on any kind of computer. Universal access was possible thanks to a portable client that could render HTML pages and a portable server that could pump out canned pages and dynamically generate new ones. The trend now is to locate more intelligence on the client, in the form of plug-ins and Java or ActiveX components. But Netscape understands that there's still more mileage to be gotten out of basic HTML, or HTML mixed with JavaScript. To that end, Communicator's HTML-aware components will support several new HTML features:
Absolute x-y positioning.
Purists argue that HTML's job is only to describe content, not to specify details of its presentation. But as the definition of content b
roadens to include all kinds of GUI widgetry, application developers legitimately require a grid-like canvas. Microsoft solves this with its HTML Layout Control, but of course only in the ActiveX environment. Netscape is promoting a general-purpose HTML solution. Because these two methods are significantly at odds, the layout issue represents a fairly serious threat to the universality of Web pages.
Layers.
Netscape is adding a third dimension to the Web page. This means an HTML document can be a stack of layers that scripts can selectively activate. You can use this feature to create tabbed dialog boxes, or even simple animations, using nothing more than HTML and JavaScript. Why can't Java handle these chores? It can, but when a pure HTML/JavaScript solution will suffice, developers will find it easier to create and deploy, and users will find it quicker to load and run.
JavaScript Style Sheets(JSS).
JSS marries HTML style sheets with JavaScript's ability to sense an
d react to things like the width of the browser's window. Styles can therefore adapt intelligently to the ambient properties of the viewer.
New Plug-Ins
Netscape plug-ins began as a way to use native code to render special data, such as PDF files or Shockwave animations, within the browser. In theory, native plug-ins won't be needed much longer because Java components will meet the same need and do so portably. In practice, that day is far off, and during this transitional era, plug-ins will continue to play an important role. To simplify their use, Netscape will unify the binary formats and the download mechanisms of plug-ins and Java components. And the company continues to emphasize LiveConnect, a kind of software bus that enables plug-ins, Java, and JavaScript to interact within the browser. With this technology, a plug-in can be more than a canned object that renders foreign data. It can become a first-class scriptable component around which you can build whole families of applic
ations.
Autodesk's
MapGuide
demonstrates what you can do with a powerful plug-in that exposes methods and properties to Java and JavaScript by way of LiveConnect. In its vanilla form, MapGuide negotiates with a back-end geographic information system (GIS) to fetch map views of GIS data; the categories of information presented adjust dynamically according to the scale of the map. Under JavaScript control, MapGuide can create, for example, a distributed authoring system that a phone company might use to build an attributed map of its network. "It's a truly Net-centric system," says Rod Munro, Internet technology manager for Autodesk's GIS market group. Why isn't MapGuide written in Java? "We're too graphics-intensive," says Munro. That means the plug-in has to be ported to multiple platforms. Netscape's plug-in SDK isn't a write-once, compile-everywhere solution, and it doesn't isolate the plug-in developer from OS-specific APIs. But Autodesk is prepared to do the programming needed to
give users maximum power and capability, as are many developers who today support multiple platforms.
It would be handy if you could automatically convert your own custom C++ applications into Netscape plug-ins. Stingray Software's Objective Plug-in does just that for applications built using the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). "Corporate developers are thinking Java long-term," says Scot Wingo, Stingray's cofounder. "But short-term, they've got a lot of MFC code that they need to Web-enable." Version 1 of Object Plug-in won't handle Java-to-plug-in communication, but Wingo says users are requesting LiveConnect support, and he hopes to add it in a future release.
Java Wrappers
Internet-enabled groupware applications will tend to do similar kinds of things: look up users in directories, send messages, store documents on Web servers. Netscape is encapsulating the protocols and services used to accomplish these tasks in a set of Java libraries called the Internet Foundation Class
es (IFC). The first available IFC concerns itself, atypically, with GUI programming. It's a wrapper around JavaSoft's Abstract Windowing Toolkit. But Netscape also plans to bundle with Communicator a set of additional classes that will connect client-side Java programs to back-end security, messaging, discussion, directory, and publishing services.
It's a powerful idea. Suppose you're writing a work-flow application, in Java, that approves and routes purchase orders. With the security and messaging IFC in place, you could use secure e-mail as the application's transport layer. And you could deploy the application anywhere -- even on a network computer. Note that while Netscape will provide the same IFCs on its servers, your use of client IFCs does not dictate matching IFC-enabled servers. IFCs map down to standard Internet protocols such as LDAP and SMTP, so the purchase-order application could send messages using any servers that support these protocols. Over time, Netscape plans to bind all the IFCs on
both clients and servers to Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) interfaces.
Programmable Server
Web-based software systems have always been client/server systems. They're now rapidly evolving into three-tier systems that cleave presentation services from business logic and business logic from data manipulation. Virtually all the new Web development toolkits, including NetDynamics from the same-name company, Sanga's Sanga Pages, HAHT's HAHTsite, Borland's IntraBuilder, and Bluestone's Sapphire/Web, support this three-tier model. They all provide foundation services such as persistent sessions and database connectivity. Each defines a way to program middle-tier applications, using Java (NetDynamics, Sanga Pages), VBScript (HAHTsite), JavaScript (IntraBuilder), or C++ (Sapphire/Web).
Among the first of this breed of toolkit was Netscape's LiveWire. To program in LiveWire you write a mixture of HTML and JavaScript. Then you use the <server> tag to denote which frag
ments of code should execute in the LiveWire run-time engine, an Enterprise Server extension that adds application, client, session, and database objects to JavaScript. Developers found the LiveWire system to be highly productive. Inevitably, though, they soon wanted to create their own custom LiveWire objects and build these scriptable components in C++ or Java. They also wanted more flexible ways to deploy middle-tier applications. LiveWire is a Netscape server API (NSAPI) module that runs in Enterprise Server's address space. That's a high-performance solution, but applications are more robust if they can run in their own processes. Similarly, applications are more scalable if these processes can migrate to other machines.
You can extend Netscape's Enterprise Server 2.0 using C/C++, JavaScript, or Java, but these methods are limited, and you can't integrate the different flavors of each module. Version 3.0 promises to blow all the doors wide open. Server plug-ins (aka SPAPI modules) replace NSAPI modul
es, and these plug-ins will be CORBA-style objects that export interface definition language (IDL) interfaces and speak IIOP. Packaged thusly, they can run in the Enterprise Server's address space or in a separate process that can be local or remote. And developers can write them in any language for which IDL bindings exist. What's more, a server-side implementation of LiveConnect will enable two-way communication between SPAPI plug-ins and Java or JavaScript code, which means plug-ins can become scriptable components just as they can on the client.
You can deploy Java modules called HTTPApplets in Enterprise Server 2.0, but they're of limited use because they can't share the persistence and database services of the LiveWire subsystem. In 3.0, these become ServerApplets, which can use LiveWire objects and can also provide new objects to LiveWire. ServerApplets will also be able to use the directory, messaging, security, and other services available by way of the Internet Foundation Classes. A work-flow mo
dule that routes a document would use these services to look up users and transmit messages. It might use IIOP to ask an external document manager to version the document and then invoke a JavaScript-controlled database in order to log the event.
Netscape's Open Network Environment (ONE) is the sum of three parts: LiveConnect-style integration of Java, JavaScript, and plug-ins; the Internet Foundation Classes; and the CORBA/IIOP model of distributed computing. Netscape plans to materialize ONE in a symmetrical fashion on both clients and servers. "We've committed to putting first IFCs, then later IIOP bindings, onto all the SuiteSpot 3.0 servers," says Eric Hahn, senior vice president of enterprise technology for Netscape. This means that you could, for example, deploy a Java-based message switch on the mail server.
What does the "open" in ONE really mean? It affirms Netscape's commitment to multiple platforms and to Internet standards. Platform neutrality means a lot to developers. News Corporation's
Popkin says his team respects and uses NT, but for a site that draws 10 million hits a day, "an Alpha server gives us twice the performance under Digital Unix, and when we tune the kernel we get another factor of two." Internet standards ensure that no one need bet on Netscape alone to advance the state of computing.
In the end, ONE represents a distinctive way to build software, an approach that will work first and best with Netscape clients and servers. It's radically at odds with the Microsoft way, and the stakes couldn't be higher. These two companies are battling to define how the fabric of business networks will be woven. Netscape's plan assumes platform diversity, while Microsoft's expects Windows to be everywhere and sees the Distributed Common Object Model (DCOM) as the obvious technology for distributed applications. But some companies consider this another case of Windows myopia. "The fact is that most apps will have to face the Internet and extranets," says Jens Christensen, chief technology
officer for Visigenic, a CORBA-compliant ORB developer. "It's not likely you'll find a DCOM environment on the other side."
So long as diversity prevails on the Internet, Netscape will continue to be a prime mover.
Where to Find
Autodesk
San Rafael, CA
Phone: (415) 507-5000
Internet:
http://www.autodesk.com
Net Applications: Will Netscape Set the Standard?
