FRAMINGHAM (12-01-95) - Battle lines will be drawn thick and dark Monday when Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. reveal plans to lock arms and take on Microsoft Corp. over an object standard for the Internet.
Sun and Netscape will announce Java Script, a lightweight programming language for building World Wide Web applications, officials from both companies confirmed this week.
Java, which fathered Java Script, is Sun's object-oriented programming language. It was designed to build animated Web "applets," or miniature applications that can run inside other programs.
Java Script was created because Java itself "isn't the easiest thing to program in," said Larry Weber, vice president of the developer products group at SunSoft Inc.
The goal was to create a more graphical, flexible interface -- similar to Ole's drag-and-drop capabilities -- added Mike Homer, director of marketing at Netscape in Mountain View, Calif.
In the opposite corner is Microsoft's Ole technology and a breed of self-contained Ole control objects that users can activate by dragging and dropping into applications.
While there are hundreds of Ole controls available today, they can be used only on a single PC. Microsoft is expected to address that limitation next year with Internet extensions for its Ole controls technology, called OCX.
Netscape and Sun are racing to beat Microsoft to the Internet object punch: Also part of Monday's announcement will be plans to ship a server version of Java Script early next year, Homer said.
That would give users more flexibility to decide which parts of their Web applications will reside on clients or servers. Currently, only Netscape's client-side Web browser, Navigator, supports any form of Java.
Despite Microsoft's plans to tweak Ole for cyberspace, the vendor might be better off as a joiner rather than a fighter, users and analysts agreed this week.
"They positively have to put Java [support] into" their browser, said Michael A. Goulde, a senior consultant at Patricia Seybold Group in Boston. "What they should target is interoperability between Java applets and OCXs ... but the question is: `Is Microsoft willing to play the open systems game?'"
Although it is available only in a beta-test version, Java already is too big to ignore, said Ben Narasin, president of Internet Design Group, a Web consulting firm in New York. Narasin said he won't hire a webmaster who lacks the penchant for experimenting with Java.
Webmasters must "adapt to tomorrow's new technology," he said. "Java is very much in that picture."
More than 100,000 copies of Java have been downloaded from the Internet so far, according to Sun estimates.
Furthermore, Netscape's plan to support Java applets in the next version of its popular Navigator browser -- Version 2.0 -- could catapult Java to stardom, said Rick Villars, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass.
Still, the triumph of either Java or Ole is far from a done deal. Several Internet development tools from less prominent vendors have been available for months, including products from Bluestone Software Corp. in Mt. Laurel, N.J., Macromedia Inc. in San Francisco and Spider Technologies Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.
[Copyright 1995 Computerworld (US), International Data Group Inc. All rights reserved.]