Original Page[1]
[IMAGE][2]
Habanero offers a red-hot solution
to real-time team collaboration
NCSA takes the wraps off of its wrapped objects paradigm
[IMAGE][3]
T he folks who brought us Mosaic have released another application for
the Internet -- this one is in the form of a distributed collaboration
environment named after the hottest chili pepper on earth. The National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has announced the availability of the Beta 1
release of NCSA Habanero, a Java-based solution to the problems of true
synchronous network groupware. Beta Habanero -- including bytecode and
source code -- can now be downloaded for free at
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero .
[IMAGE]
"Habanero is a project to explore the power of distributed objects for
enabling collaboration in a Javatized Net," said Larry Smarr, founder
and director of the NCSA. "It is written from the ground up in Java and
forms the framework for other researchers to create specialized software
tools."
"With Habanero, you can take a tool, for whatever your field is, and
very readily turn it into something that you and your colleagues can use
to simultaneously examine, analyze, or evaluate the same information: a
picture, graph, spreadsheet, whatever," said Larry Jackson, technical
manager for the NCSA Habanero Group.
According to the NCSA Habanero home page: "Included, or planned, are all
the networking facilities, routing, arbitration, and synchronization
mechanisms necessary to accomplish the sharing of state data and key
events between collaborator's copies of a software tool.... There is no
inherent limit in the number of tools per session, nor is there a limit
on the type of tools that may be shared. As the [Habanero] project
progresses, additional capabilities will enable routing of Habanero
session information to a very wide number of participants."
Wrapped objects
Essential to Habanero is the use of wrapped objects -- transmitting Java
objects instead of formatted packets of data across a network. "We use
this to transmit actions in the applications we've written to
communicate with each other," said Stephen Pietrowicz, a member of the
Habanero technical team. "For example, when I type in a whiteboard, the
action of hitting Return in the key in the input area is transmitted
along with text in the input area to all of the applications across the
session. A mouse-up action in the whiteboard is transmitted along with
the object that was drawn to all of the other applications. And so on."
"Wrapped objects offer three important advantages to distributed
collaboration over the Internet," said Jackson. "The first is in more
closely matching the internals of the programs that are being shared --
they can just send their own existing state representations, without
building data tables and adding the protocol code for whatever
specification applies. Simply, it's easier to port a program to this
framework than to write all the networking code yourself.
"Secondly, come the issues of session capture, suspense, replay, and
edit. We can -- soon -- save the whole stream of the multimedia,
multi-tool distributed conference, and can then replay or edit this
electronic 'transcript' for absent colleagues, or to produce a
derivative work. And as all the state and event data moves in this one
framework, it's easy to get ahold of it for integrated session archival.
"Third, it leverages Java's Virtual Machine specification to mask system
heterogeneities from developers. Java handles the
'little-endian/big-endian' problems in building data packets, as well as
a host of other problems. Application developers won't have to waste
time on all that."
The care and feeding of a pepper
The NCSA Habanero project has been underway for quite a while, taking
more than five years of work on the part of full-time staff and
students. Credit for the name Habanero goes to Jackson. Why he picked a
pepper for his project's label appears to be a question of degree rather
than taste. Pietrowicz explained: "Peppers are measured [for their
spiciness] in 'scovilles.' A jalapeno, for example, is about 5,000
scovilles. A habanero is an astounding 300,000 scovilles. It's the
hottest pepper there is. Some of the folks at Sun thought it was
interesting that we went with the 'hot' part, as opposed to everyone
else coming out with coffee-related words."
Will Habanero blossom into more hit commercial products from the fertile
soil of the NCSA?
"That could happen," said Jackson. "There is the clear applicability of
synchronous conferencing in the classic office applications: text
editors, spreadsheets, et cetera. The NCSA is certainly not looking to
attempt to compete with the fine commercial offerings in these areas.
However, if some of these firms licensed Habanero, all the science,
engineering, and education players we're working with would
significantly benefit."
The main Habanero Web site is already hosting a number of Java applets
as demonstration vehicles for its technology. Among the organizations
currently demonstrating their concepts for shared multi-user experiences
are the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University,
with an applet called the NPAC Visible Human Viewer; the Department of
Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, with its Weather
Visualizer; and Sun Microsystems' JavaSoft, with applets called Cards
Demo and Whiteboard Demo.
Be there now
A public server (http://havefun.ncsa.uiuc.edu at port 2000) will be
dedicated to hosting an applet called Chat on a limited basis -- Fridays
from 1:00 to 3:00 PM CST. Upon clicking on "Join" (for those whose
machines have an externally resolvable DNS name), the Chat window will
enable developers to try out their Habanero installations while actually
performing remote collaboration.
There are also discussion groups that can be joined by emailing to
habanero-users-request@habanero.ncsa.uiuc.edu and
habanero-developers-request@h abanero.ncsa.uiuc.edu . Just type
"subscribe" in the subject line.
Great expectations?
Though Jackson said that the NCSA is not in any licensing discussions at
this time, you can expect that to change soon. An email address for
licensing inquiries has already been set up at
license@habanero.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Smarr, in a recent report in the Wall
Street Journal , speculated that Habanero is about "six to eight months
from a final ramp-up" and that the first applications employing its
technology could appear shortly thereafter.
"We strongly want to encourage software-tool developers to explore the
concept of adding a synchronous work mode," Jackson said. "It's never
been possible or practical before, without a lot of networking hassles.
So we suspect designers are in the habit of assuming it's too hard. It's
not too hard anymore, especially for Java developers." -- Kieron Murphy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-1996/jw-07-habanero.html
[2] /javaworld/icons/blueline.gif
[3] /javaworld/icons/blueline.gif