Nebula 2/Nebula Two.iso/Documents/Other/WhitherTheWeb.txt

Text File | 1995-10-26 | 10KB | 158 lines

Item    8048960                 95/10/18        20:51
From: [e-mail] (John Markle)
Subject: Whither the Web?
Date: 19 Oct 1995 00:18:33 GMT
Organization: Le Club Macintosh de Montreal

What's NeXT:  Whither the Web?
by John Markle

     Before examining the directions in which the WorldWideWeb is evolving,
it best to quickly review its nature and origins. The Web is an adjunct to
the Internet, the international network of networks, and it employs a
client/server architecture to deliver multimedia hypertext documents.
Scientists at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) developed
the hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) and the hypertext markup language
(HTML), and in November, 1990, constructed the first Web server and client
browser using object-oriented NEXTSTEP on NeXT's black hardware. By
Christmas, 1990, line-mode and NEXTSTEP browsers provided access to hypertext
files, Internet news articles and a search engine at CERN. Nowadays, Web
browsers are supporting a broader range of content formats, custom inline
plug-in modules for such things as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and
NeXTTime/QuickTime movies, the file transport protocol (FTP), the simple mail
transport protocol (SMPT) and, in the near future, the Secure MIME protocol
for encryption and digital signatures as well as the virtual reality markup
language (VRML). In summary, Web browsers deliver mind-boggling power using a
friendly graphical user interface.

     Growth of the Web was initially confined to the nuclear research
community with HTTP servers being implemented at European and American
laboratories. According to the W3 Consortium, the official Web standards
organization, by January, 1993, there were about 50 known servers worldwide;
by October, 1993, over 200 known servers; and by June, 1994, over 1,500
registered servers. According to "sources" on the Internet Relay Chat, the
total number of Web servers, registered or otherwise, is now approaching
100,000. This phenomenal growth has been fueled both by official upgrades and
unofficial hacks to HTML itself, and by the distribution of free browsers for
the most common platforms. Mosaic browsers for Macintosh, DOS/Windows and X
were released in September 1993. Netscape's Navigator, Mosaic's conceptual
successor and effective replacement, appeared in December, 1994, and now
dominates roughly 75 to 80 percent of the Web client market, all platforms
included. The income model which Netscape is using involves giving away the
browser for free (effectively) and making the big bucks selling servers (or
stock certificates :-). Enhance this model with a proprietary security system
for your client browser which is "understood" only by your expensive servers,
and you have the ingredients for a possible domination of the Web server
market as well.

     Web usage within corporations, using the enterprise's own networks, is
one market waiting to explode once the right tools are in place. For example,
one way to provide client/server access to a valuable legacy system would be
to "glue" it to a Web server using middleware, and then use ubiquitous Web
browsers to provide ready access from multiple OS/hardware platforms
("three-tier on a budget"). However, this gluing process involves building a
custom application, an area in which NeXT's products excel. On a simpler
scale, product manuals or other information resources could be converted to
HTML and delivered over an enterprise network. By using Web-based
publishing-on-demand, a corporation could ensure that all of its employees
would be using current data, all of the time. As well, the option would exist
to make such data available directly to customers via the WorldWideWeb. The
fly in the ointment here will be the licensing costs for any database server
which is glued to the Web; for example, such a license (complete site,
unlimited users) costs about $30,000 US for servers from Sybase.

     Currently, most of the Web's content is static in the sense that the
HTTP servers deliver pages which are fixed and appear the same to all
clients. Granted, new pages are constantly being published, and old pages are
being changed, but the great majority of these pages are not client-specific.
However, this is about to change with the immanent spread of dynamic
publishing. In a dynamic system, the client's specific question is relayed by
the Web server to a Web-aware middleware agent, again a custom application,
which in turn interacts with the database/system at hand, creating a HTML
page unique to the client, and returning that unique page to the Web server
for delivery. For example, dynamic pages are returned by search engines such
as Yahoo and WebCrawler ("powered by NEXTSTEP"), but the Web pages pointed to
in each dynamic answer are themselves static.

     Therefore, a dynamic approach enables Web services such as
client-specific newspapers or shopping catalogues. Many believe that there is
money to be made in the mass market, provided the tailor-made pages are
reasonably priced. The simplest income model is that provided by the search
engines: access to the pages is free, but you can't avoid the advertising;
the engine's income depends upon the number of "hits" on the Web pages
containing advertisments. A more lucrative income model involves a variable
charge for each question (preferably estimated beforehand) which depends upon
both the scope of the search and the size of the answer. With this model,
information providers are not giving away razors as Netscape is, but rather
are selling razor blades repeatedly at a nominal cost.

     Now let's assume that you find something on the Web that you want to
order on-line. Besides the obvious security issue related to your credit card
number, another major problem must be solved before this electronic commerce
scenario will work: you must somehow interact with the target company's
in-house business systems such as order management, credit verification and
whatever else. Once again, each such Web/enterprise interface represents a
custom application, the tools for which are not yet on the market. However,
within the last few months, three major companies have announced products
which are targeted at solving this core problem of building Web-aware
applications, thereby enabling Web sites for enterprise networks, dynamic
publishing and electronic commerce.

     On August 14th, NeXT announced their WebObjects Framework, billed as the
"industry's first tool to enable rapid development of complex Web-based
applications," and scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 1996.
WebObjects applications will be able to build HTML pages containing data from
multiple databases by using NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF). They
will also be able to distribute requests by using NeXT's Portable Distributed
Objects (PDO), thereby providing the ability to scale the Web operation as
required. According to Steve Jobs, "WebObjects provide corporations with
powerful tools to quickly fill the WWW - the ultimate distribution channel -
with products."

     On September 18th, Netscape announced Navigator 2.0, with many new
features, as well as three new products. Navigator Gold "makes every online
user an Internet publisher" by "allowing users to create sophisticated
hypermedia content, including Live Objects, in a WYSIWYG environment."
LiveWire and LiveWire Pro will provide "a powerful and easy-to-use
environment for creating and managing rich content and application systems on
the Internet or within the enterprise." LiveWire Pro will enable the
construction of applications which will allow Navigator 2.0  users to
"navigate, search, and update relational databases." These products are
scheduled for delivery in the fourth quarter of 1995.

     Lastly, on September 20th, SunSoft, the software arm of Sun
Microsystems, announced its NEO product family, a "development, operating and
management environment for object-oriented networked applications." NEO will
be able to automatically access databases from the major vendors, and will
eventually be compliant with OpenStep, the open object protocol developed by
NeXT from NEXTSTEP's OS-independent object layer. Internet access to the NEO
environment will be accomplished by Web browsers using Java, an
object-oriented scripting language recently introduced by Sun Microsystems.
"NEO enables Java applications to serve as the flexible desktop front-end to
powerful computational resources available on servers spread throughout the
Internet. As a result, Java applications can now access intelligent
services." The initial release of the NEO product family is scheduled for
October, 1995; the NeXT-related NEO components (OpenStep, NEOdesktop and
OpenStep Developer) will be available for beta testing in the fourth quarter
of 1995.

     In conclusion, the Web is definitely going places quickly (enterprise
networks, dynamic publishing and electronic commerce) and the stage now has
been set for what promises to be a very interesting battle for dominance in
the Web tools market. Objects have played, and will continue to play, an
integral role in the Web's evolution. Since NeXT's object-oriented products
have been involved with the Web from the very beginning, and since the
WebObjects Framework leverages NeXT's existing products and strengths, NeXT
stands a very good chance of carving out a lucrative niche for itself in the
exploding WorldWideWeb market.

---

John Markle runs the NEXTSTEP Special Interest Group for Le Club Macintosh de
Montreal and can be reached at  [e-mail]. The views
expressed above are his own, and not those of Le Club.



=END=