SAN MATEO (05-30-95) - Netscape Communications Corp. announced last week that Version 2.0 of its World Wide Web browser software, Netscape Navigator, will incorporate Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java programming language.
Netscape, which made the announcement at the Sunworld conference in San Francisco, is also expected to unveil next month plans to license multimedia capabilities for its browser from Macromedia Inc.
Java is an object-oriented, portable programming language similar to C++ that is designed for Web programming. Applets created with Java are more dynamic than Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents, enabling users to include elements such as animation on Web pages. Java includes hooks to HTML so that applets can be displayed on standard HTML Web pages.
Patrick Naughton, vice president of technology for Starwave Corp., a Web publishing company, has been using Java applets to create real-time chat areas and sports ticker displays on his company's Web sites.
"HTML is okay for publishing documents," Naughton said, "but when you get into real-time statistics and scores, it's not very efficient."
Users with HTML-only browsers, such as the current versions of Netscape Navigator and NCSA Mosaic, must manually reload a document in order to refresh information on the screen.
Similarly, HTML is not well suited to chat applications. "Chat is miserable [with HTML]," Naughton said. "You have to constantly reload."
A Java applet, on the other hand, can offer chat capabilities similar to those available on America Online and other on-line services.
In addition to being compatible with HTML and Java, Netscape Navigator 2.0 will be compatible with at least two other types of document and file formats, including Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format and Progressive Networks Inc.'s RealAudio, a technology for playing back sound in real time over narrow-band connections, according to Marc Andreessen, Netscape's vice president of technology.
Netscape will also announce a licensing agreement with a multimedia vendor sometime in June, Andreessen said.
That vendor is expected to be Macromedia, and an announcement is expected at next week's Digital World conference in Los Angeles, sources said.
Netscape Navigator 2.0, which will be released by the end of 1995, will be available for a number of platforms, including Macintosh, Windows, Solaris, and others, according to Netscape.
Users interested in programming with Java can download free binary versions of the language for Solaris, Windows NT, and Windows 95 from http://www.sun.com. A Mac version will be available in June.
Currently, the only Java-compatible browser available is Sun's HotJava. Sun plans to license Java to other browser vendors, according to a company spokesman, although no agreements have been announced yet.
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