upon announcement of netscape one i brought up these points to the
infosphere group here at caltech. there is a mess developing here
because of netscape's need to push their ideas, and not products, to
market. netscape one is nothing more than a whitepaper and a new
name for a collection of heretofore unrelated tools. you could
almost compare it to activex in that light. :)
in any case, if netscape decides to go ahead an engineer some of
the components of their one
release before the specs for java 1.1 are released, we could have a
serious problem in the short-term. in the long-term, i believe
that developers of java applications are much more likely to support
the sun specs regardless of release timing issues. you see, the
java developer community seems to be very pro-sun and
anti-establishment (at least until the wintel hordes arrive).
it's not just security and messaging either - all the so-called
'distributed objects' pieces of the spec are to have netscape
proprietary apis, though many will be using omg iiop for the
communication protocol (bravo netscape, and i don't say that very
often).
i believe that we will see more these java-related clashes because,
with the lucrativeness of the market, everyone is racing to be the
first to announce. have you ever seen so many white papers
describing technology that "we're thinking about doing but you can't
blame us if we don't" _ever_?
i don't think this clash will come to a head though. sun and
netscape have pretty good communication channels and i'm sure
pre-releases of apis for the components in which netscape has
interest will be made available. so, regardless of
re-implementation strategies (i.e. we want to get to market 2 months
before sun), at least the apis will be identical. now let's just
hope that the semantics are as well...
joe