FRAMINGHAM (11-18-95) - In one of the first commercial Java success stories, National Semiconductor Corp. has used the hot new programming language to salvage a flagging World-Wide Web project intended to help electronics designers access and search the company's vast parts databases.
National will launch the application next month, and Java creator Sun Microsystems Inc. is touting it as a major coup. Sun is pushing to have Java become the de facto standard for building the next generation of Web applications.
Web applications today typically support sets of documents that end users download. With Java, a program is automatically downloaded with the Web page to the local client computer. This turns the Web infrastructure into a true client/server medium for running real business applications instead of merely a storehouse of static documents.
National is relying on the technology to simplify the lives of electronic systems designers. Usually, these designers juggle thick paper catalogs looking for the information they need to select the appropriate integrated circuits for new products, said Rick Brennan, manager of World- Wide Web services at National's Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. The catalogs are bulky, typically six to nine months out of date, and users have to learn parts numbering schemes to get through them.
What the designers really needed, and what Brennan set out to build, was a way to use PCs to describe their needs in terms of such criteria as desired performance, power consumption and temperature ranges.
The solution was an object-oriented search and retrieval engine from Cadis Inc. in Boulder, Colo., that lets users query data in this way -- what Cadis officials call a "guided, interactive search." But it was Java that made it possible to run the engine in the Web environment.
"To do this [kind of query] with a relational database, I would have to cobble together a complex SQL query going over multiple tables and doing multiple joins," said Janet Eden-Harris, director of marketing at Cadis. "And trying to do this over the Web, with its network latencies, is unworkable."
That's because the HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) with which Web pages are created is sessionless, Brennan said. Traditionally, an application session maintains a context of information and actions as the user works through a process. "We were having a hell of a time," Brennan said. "This idea of a `guided, interactive search' is very difficult to do in HTML."
National and Cadis learned about Java at about the same time and at once saw its potential: Java downloads not pages but applications, which can sustain a networked session by using remote procedure calls to server processes.
As a general-purpose programming language, Java can be used to write client or server programs. It has built-in security features and runs on multiple operating systems. The downloaded applet can be a simple animator, a full-blown spreadsheet or a complex three-dimensional modeling program.
"It's well thought out, solid, fairly easy to write and easy to learn if you have a solid C/C++ background," said Sam Pendleton, senior member of technical staff at Cadis.
Cadis developers did a crash rewrite of the search engine's client in Java and renamed it Krakatoa (the famous volcano near the island of Java).
Now electronics designers will log in to National's Web site, download the Krakatoa client and begin searching National's database of 30,000 parts by working their way down through a graphical, hierarchical product tree or by simply inputting performance criteria.
At any point, the application can link to the relevant technical documents, which are stored at a separate Web site maintained by R.R. Donnelly & Sons Co. in Chicago.
National's next step will be to add a button to the Java applet that designers will click on when they have made their product selection. The button will activate a program that will let designers order sample parts, which would be delivered within two days.
"The whole point is, how do we make this process as painless as possible?" Brennan said. "This changes the whole way we talk to our customers."
[Copyright 1995 Network World (US), International Data Group Inc. All rights reserved.]