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Java in the real world
Java is changing the way companies market products on the Internet
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CADIS will distribute Krakatoa at no charge to clients over the Internet. Krakatoa server software will be available for commercial licensing to companies that want to implement CADIS technology to publish their product data and provide search-and-retrieval capabilities for their customers. The beta version was released on February 2; Krakatoa's expected first customer shipment date is March 31, 1996.
Shopping on the Web
When the Internet Shopping Network (ISN) first launched its online shopping mall in April of 1994, it focused on selling computer hardware and software in an effort to match the perceived interests of Web users and utilize the Web's capacity as a demonstration and distribution platform for software releases and upgrades. Soon the company began to realize that online retail opportunities existed outside of the high-tech market. When the billion-dollar cable television retailer, the Home Shopping Network, acquired ISN in September of 1994, ISN expanded its product line rapidly to include gourmet food, flowers, children's merchandise, cameras, video tapes and equipment, as well as toys, games, office supplies and clothing. But ISN's real opportunity lies not in making retail items available to consumers through yet another outlet, but in the potential to do real-time commodity trading -- interactively -- over the Internet, a feat that would not be possible without Java.
At the SunWorld Exposition last May, ISN demonstrated a prototype application for an online, interactive auction which it developed using the alpha release of Java. Participants bid against one another in real time for a series of classic automobiles shown on the screen. The auctioneer's voice calls out bids and prices. A ticker tape rolls continuously across the top of the screen, showing the current bid and sale prices of each vehicle and updating in real time the bids as users enter them.
"Java makes true interactivity over the Web possible," said Boris Putanec, Vice President of engineering for ISN. "Up to now, Web clients have been nothing more than passive observers. You could go to a Web site and see a slide show; maybe if you had enough bandwidth, see some full motion video. Java changes all that."
The beauty of doing business over the Internet, according to Putanec, is in the real-time interaction between users. "The auction is not like a [standard HTML-based] chat room -- in other words, you don't always have to push a Reload button to update what other clients have entered. It's a shared, community experience."
Putanec divides retail products into two categories. First, there are the "touch-and-feel" products such as clothing or cars where the purchaser must have a good tactile and visual sense of a product before buying it. Then there are commodity products such as heavy equipment, airplanes or "....the 10,000 hard disks that someone wants to unload to the highest bidder." The former category, as Putanec sees it, is not as well suited to online shopping; the latter is a natural for the Internet.
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