Original SunWorld Online Page[1]
Netscape unveils intranet strategy
Application development tools targeted at intranets and the Internet
San Francisco -- Netscape Communications Corp. has announced a
standards-based platform and set of development tools aimed at enabling
software companies to create applications for corporate intranets and
the Internet.
The tools called Netscape ONE (Open Network Environment), which Netscape
will give away free, will enable developers to create applications which
run on most operating systems.
"The Netscape ONE platform unifies the open, publicly-defined standards
that are the foundation of Netscape's leading software products," said
Marc Andressen, senior vice president of technology at Netscape. The new
platform brings together Internet standards such as HTTP, HTML, LDAP and
Java into one unified developer package.
So far, 21 companies have licensed Netscape ONE, including Adobe Systems
Inc., Borland International Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc., Symantec Corp.
and Macromedia Inc., but some analysts don't think these companies are
enough to make Netscape ONE the industry standard it is setting out to
be.
"The vendors who've licensed the technology aren't mainstream vendors,"
said Mike Kennedy, program director for research firm, The Meta Group.
"Plus, licensing a technology is different than delivering products that
use it," Kennedy continued. More companies will have to jump on the
Netscape ONE bandwagon, he said, before it poses a real threat to
Microsoft Corp.'s ActiveX development architecture for creating
component-based applications. "It's a good first step for Netscape, but
a lot still needs to be delivered," said Kennedy.
Microsoft's ActiveX is similar to the CORBA (Common Object Request
Broker Architecture) technology included in the Netscape ONE platform
because both can be used to facilitate communications between software
objects and applications. ActiveX works only on Windows machines while
CORBA has been ported to multiple operating systems.
In a separate announcement, Microsoft Corp. said that it would transfer
control of ActiveX to an independent group of customers and neutral
organizations, reportedly to dispel beliefs that ActiveX is a
proprietary technology tied to the Windows platform. --Kristi Essick,
IDG News Service, San Francisco Bureau
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[1] http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-08-1996/swol-08-netscape.html