To stay on top of announcements from the major players of the Internet set, you could conceivably have spent the last several months ratcheting up frequent flier miles. All three of the following companies hosted conferences for developers and other IS professionals during the fall and into the winter to reveal their latest Internet ambitions. Here's a brief report on their news.
The Oracle Payment Server handles the payment aspect of the transaction and supports payments from several electronic payment companies, including CyberCash (www.cybercash.com), First Data (www.firstdata.com), and VeriFone (www.verifone.com). Oracle Security Server, a digital certificate-based authentication server, will ensure the legitimacy and integrity of the parties involved in the transactions. The server will issue digital certificates to verify the identity of a customer or merchant and serve as a repository for the certificates. Oracle Inter-Office, an electronic mail system for sending HTML-based mail, will enable companies to send the electronic equivalent of direct mail.
The company expects beta versions of the products to start appearing during the first half of 1997. To learn more, visit www.oracle.com/initiatives/ecomerce/
html/index.shtml.
Netscape has added six new servers to the planned suite: Messaging Server 3.0, an upgraded version of Netscape's messaging system; Netscape Collabra Server 3.0, a discussion server; Enterprise Server 3.0, an upgrade of Netscape's Web server; Proxy Server 2.5, a new version of the company's Web content replication and filtering server; Calendar Server 1.0, an enterprise scheduling system; and Media Server 1.0, a streaming audio server for delivering audio content on Web sites and Intranets.
The servers are scheduled to be available the first quarter of 1997 on Microsoft Windows NT and major Unix platforms. Pricing starts at $3,995 for any five of the nine servers plus a copy of LiveWire Pro. To learn more, visit www.netscape.com/comprod/announce/index.htm.
Internet Studio, which may be in public beta by the time you read this, enables developers to add data connectivity to Web applications in several ways: through design-time controls, a new class of ActiveX Controls that automatically generate the HTML and server scripting logic necessary to add database functionality; through Microsoft Active Data Objects, a new feature of IIS 3.0 that provides server-side database access to any ODBC database, including Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Microsoft FoxPro, and IBM DB/2; through Data View and Query Designer, tools that work with any ODBC database; and through Database Designer, which applies Microsoft Access table-definition tools to the creation and modification of Microsoft SQL Server databases.
For access to a white paper on the Active Platforms, visit www.microsoft.com/webdev/. For more information about Internet Studio, visit www.microsoft.com/istudio/.
Oracle on E-Commerce
Oracle Corp. outlined an "end-to-end" Java-based solution for electronic commerce at a strategy day on October 15. The idea behind Project Apollo, the internal name for its merchant server project, is to provide the tools and technologies for companies to create and operate virtual storefronts on the Internet. Apollo, the merchant server, manages transactions. On the front end resides a Java applet that acts as a "shopping cart application," allowing customers to browse through a catalog, pick up products, drop them into a shopping cart, total the price, and decide whether to place orders.
Netscape Expands Suite
In an effort to shore up and expand its share of the server market, Netscape Communications Corp., at its Internet Developers Conference in October, announced a newly-expanded Netscape SuiteSpot 3.0, formerly code-named Orion, a set of products for building and maintaining email, publishing, and groupware applications on corporate Intranets. Until recently, the suite was to include four products: Netscape's Directory Server 1.0, to manage contact and security information; Certificate Server 1.0, for managing public-key certificates or digital IDs; Catalog Server 1.0, for maintaining an online catalog of documents residing on an Intranet; and LiveWire Pro 1.0, a development environment that works with existing databases.
Microsoft Gets More Active
At its Site Builder Conference (held October 28 through 30) and Professional Developer Conference (held November 4 through 7), Microsoft Corp. outlined the Active Platform, its strategy for Internet- and Intranet-based development. The Active Platform encompasses several product fronts. First, on the browser side, Active Desktop includes language-independent scripting, component integration, and dynamic HTML technology in products such as Explorer 4.0, Internet Studio, and FrontPage. Second, Active Server, built on Windows NT Server, includes Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0 with Active Server Pages (formerly code-named Denali), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Microsoft Transaction Server (formerly code-named Viper), and Falcon, the code name for Microsoft's message queuing-based middleware. Last, ActiveX, Microsoft's software component technology will get a push through Visual Basic 5.0 (Control Creation Edition), which enables developers to build ActiveX Controls.
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Updated Friday, December 13, 1996.