SAN FRANCISCO (08-15-95) - Next Computer Inc. has made its move on the World Wide Web with the announcement at Object World here yesterday of WebObjects. John Landwehr, Next product manager in charge of WebObjects, spoke to Michael Parsons of the IDG News Service about getting dynamic applications up and running on the Web.
IDGNS: What is WebObjects?
LANDWEHR: It's an environment for building object-oriented Web applications. It's a rapid application development environment, about five to 10 times faster when compared to typical methods. We're database- independent. Oracle has an Oracle7 product, but that's all. None of the other database vendors are doing anything with objects. We also support Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) and CORBA, and we will have the first OLE- and CORBA-compliant server for the Web.
IDGNS: How will you sell it?
LANDWEHR: One way is that we would go out to the Internet world and try to interest the companies that are already there. We plan on making this product available on the Web. There'll be a bunch of sites out there. Because of our OpenStep for Windows strategy, that definitely opens up that channel. We also see our partners selling their machines with our software involved.
The Web server market is a hot business. However, what we're finding is that the general corporate market is already very thirsty for these Web- based applications for internal use. There are still these Unix and Mac applications out there, despite Windows's dominance. With a Web application, you can support all that hardware on the same application just buy giving everyone their own browser. We've already got a number of very big customers saying that they need to build internal applications for the Web. It's the mainframe of the '90s, except you can send more interesting stuff.
IDGNS: How does what you're doing relate to Sun's Java Web development environment?
LANDWEHR: The honest truth about Sun is that we're very close partners with them. We like Java. We think it takes the best aspects of C++ and Objective C. However, to be throwing together these little applets that can be downloaded to clients is maybe getting a little ahead of the game. If we see Java being widely implemented, it will tie in well with what we're doing. Netscape has committed to doing Java, but our inside sources say that's not a top priority there right now.
IDGNS: The Web Objects Framework uses much of the same technology as the Enterprise Object Framework (EOF) for database access. How tough a job was it to develop?
LANDWEHR: What we wanted to do was to leverage enterprise objects. If you wanted to, you could just do it with SQL. Instead, we leveraged Portable Distributed Objects and EOF, and then the Web Object Framework acts as a presentation layer that dynamically generates the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) output.
IDGNS: Everything on the Web seems to be free. How will Next make money at it?
LANDWEHR: I wouldn't say that the Netscape business model is ideal. You can give away the servers and then change US$10,000 for upgrades and security and support, but you have to sell a lot of $10,000 servers. Our added benefit is that you can build these Web-based applications. We are working through professional services and with users to get the technology out to customers and to find out how much they want to pay for it, and then we see a product release in the first quarter of next year. We definitely want to go mainstream with this, as it's server- and client-independent. In the server market, Java may be Sun's long-term goal, but they need a short- term one. Hewlett-Packard has no announced strategy, and the Web server market is a hot business right now.
IDGNS: Won't you face competition from other vendors who are hooking up existing applications to the Web?
LANDWEHR: Sure, IBM is doing a DB2 gateway, but nobody is really doing objects. Sun is downloading objects -- but they're not tying it into any framework of enterprise objects, although I'm sure they'll get there. We were able to leverage 10 years of Portable Distributed Objects, and it makes it very easy to build new applications for the Web. I whipped together an application for turning Word documents into HTML, and I'm no programmer. Organizations spend months trying to come up with the sort of dynamic Web applications that we could build in a week. It's not just about budget, it's also about backlog.
[Copyright 1995 IDG News Service, International Data Group Inc. All rights reserved.]