Le Club Macintosh de MontrƯal Publication: Mac@Zine Issue: November/December 1995 Author: John Markle Series: What's NeXT? Title: Whither the Web? Image: A jpeg from NeXT's web site entitled "WebObjetcs, Enterprise Web Server." ------------------------------------ Whither the Web? by John Markle Before examining the directions in which the WorldWideWeb is evolving, it best to quickly review its nature and origins. The Web is an adjunct to the Internet, the international network of networks, and it employs a client/server architecture to deliver multimedia hypertext documents. Scientists at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) developed the hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) and the hypertext markup language (HTML), and in November, 1990, constructed the first Web server and client browser using object-oriented NEXTSTEP on NeXT's black hardware. By Christmas, 1990, line-mode and NEXTSTEP browsers provided access to hypertext files, Internet news articles and a search engine at CERN. Nowadays, Web browsers are supporting a broader range of content formats, custom inline plug-in modules for such things as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and NeXTTime/QuickTime movies, the file transport protocol (FTP), the simple mail transport protocol (SMPT) and, in the near future, the Secure MIME protocol for encryption and digital signatures as well as the virtual reality markup language (VRML). In summary, Web browsers deliver mind-boggling power using a friendly graphical user interface. Growth of the Web was initially confined to the nuclear research community with HTTP servers being implemented at European and American laboratories. According to the W3 Consortium, the official Web standards organization, by January, 1993, there were about 50 known servers worldwide; by October, 1993, over 200 known servers; and by June, 1994, over 1,500 registered servers. According to "sources" on the Internet Relay Chat, the total number of Web servers, registered or otherwise, is now approaching 100,000. This phenomenal growth has been fueled both by official upgrades and unofficial hacks to HTML itself, and by the distribution of free browsers for the most common platforms. Mosaic browsers for Macintosh, DOS/Windows and X were released in September 1993. Netscape's Navigator, Mosaic's conceptual successor and effective replacement, appeared in December, 1994, and now dominates roughly 75 to 80 percent of the Web client market, all platforms included. The income model which Netscape is using involves giving away the browser for free (effectively) and making the big bucks selling servers (or stock certificates :-). Enhance this model with a proprietary security system for your client browser which is "understood" only by your expensive servers, and you have the ingredients for a possible domination of the Web server market as well. Web usage within corporations, using the enterprise's own networks, is one market waiting to explode once the right tools are in place. For example, one way to provide client/server access to a valuable legacy system would be to "glue" it to a Web server using middleware, and then use ubiquitous Web browsers to provide ready access from multiple OS/hardware platforms ("three-tier on a budget"). However, this gluing process involves building a custom application, an area in which NeXT's products excel. On a simpler scale, product manuals or other information resources could be converted to HTML and delivered over an enterprise network. By using Web-based publishing-on-demand, a corporation could ensure that all of its employees would be using current data, all of the time. As well, the option would exist to make such data available directly to customers via the WorldWideWeb. The fly in the ointment here will be the licensing costs for any database server which is glued to the Web; for example, such a license (complete site, unlimited users) costs about $30,000 US for servers from Sybase. Currently, most of the Web's content is static in the sense that the HTTP servers deliver pages which are fixed and appear the same to all clients. Granted, new pages are constantly being published, and old pages are being changed, but the great majority of these pages are not client-specific. However, this is about to change with the immanent spread of dynamic publishing. In a dynamic system, the client's specific question is relayed by the Web server to a Web-aware middleware agent, again a custom application, which in turn interacts with the database/system at hand, creating a HTML page unique to the client, and returning that unique page to the Web server for delivery. For example, dynamic pages are returned by search engines such as Yahoo and WebCrawler ("powered by NEXTSTEP"), but the Web pages pointed to in each dynamic answer are themselves static. Therefore, a dynamic approach enables Web services such as client-specific newspapers or shopping catalogues. Many believe that there is money to be made in the mass market, provided the tailor-made pages are reasonably priced. The simplest income model is that provided by the search engines: access to the pages is free, but you can't avoid the advertising; the engine's income depends upon the number of "hits" on the Web pages containing advertisments. A more lucrative income model involves a variable charge for each question (preferably estimated beforehand) which depends upon both the scope of the search and the size of the answer. With this model, information providers are not giving away razors as Netscape is, but rather are selling razor blades repeatedly at a nominal cost. Now let's assume that you find something on the Web that you want to order on-line. Besides the obvious security issue related to your credit card number, another major problem must be solved before this electronic commerce scenario will work: you must somehow interact with the target company's in-house business systems such as order management, credit verification and whatever else. Once again, each such Web/enterprise interface represents a custom application, the tools for which are not yet on the market. However, within the last few months, three major companies have announced products which are targeted at solving this core problem of building Web-aware applications, thereby enabling Web sites for enterprise networks, dynamic publishing and electronic commerce. On August 14th, NeXT announced their WebObjects Framework, billed as the "industry's first tool to enable rapid development of complex Web-based applications," and scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 1996. WebObjects applications will be able to build HTML pages containing data from multiple databases by using NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF). They will also be able to distribute requests by using NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects (PDO), thereby providing the ability to scale the Web operation as required. According to Steve Jobs, "WebObjects provide corporations with powerful tools to quickly fill the WWW - the ultimate distribution channel - with products." On September 18th, Netscape announced Navigator 2.0, with many new features, as well as three new products. Navigator Gold "makes every online user an Internet publisher" by "allowing users to create sophisticated hypermedia content, including Live Objects, in a WYSIWYG environment." LiveWire and LiveWire Pro will provide "a powerful and easy-to-use environment for creating and managing rich content and application systems on the Internet or within the enterprise." LiveWire Pro will enable the construction of applications which will allow Navigator 2.0 users to "navigate, search, and update relational databases." These products are scheduled for delivery in the fourth quarter of 1995. Lastly, on September 20th, SunSoft, the software arm of Sun Microsystems, announced its NEO product family, a "development, operating and management environment for object-oriented networked applications." NEO will be able to automatically access databases from the major vendors, and will eventually be compliant with OpenStep, the open object protocol developed by NeXT from NEXTSTEP's OS-independent object layer. Internet access to the NEO environment will be accomplished by Web browsers using Java, an object-oriented scripting language recently introduced by Sun Microsystems. "NEO enables Java applications to serve as the flexible desktop front-end to powerful computational resources available on servers spread throughout the Internet. As a result, Java applications can now access intelligent services." The initial release of the NEO product family is scheduled for October, 1995; the NeXT-related NEO components (OpenStep, NEOdesktop and OpenStep Developer) will be available for beta testing in the fourth quarter of 1995. In conclusion, the Web is definitely going places quickly (enterprise networks, dynamic publishing and electronic commerce) and the stage now has been set for what promises to be a very interesting battle for dominance in the Web tools market. Objects have played, and will continue to play, an integral role in the Web's evolution. Since NeXT's object-oriented products have been involved with the Web from the very beginning, and since the WebObjects Framework leverages NeXT's existing products and strengths, NeXT stands a very good chance of carving out a lucrative niche for itself in the exploding WorldWideWeb market. John Markle runs the NEXTSTEP Special Interest Group for Le Club Macintosh de Montreal and can be reached at john_markle@lcmm.login.qc.ca. The views expressed above are his own, and not those of Le Club.