Push technology is now expanding beyond the public Internet and into the corporate Intranet arena. Push technology sends information to users' desktops instead of requiring users to fetch or pull the information from an Internet or Intranet site. The evolution of push technology mimics that of the Web itself, and astute developers should be watching this new trend. It's already moving beyond news headlines, daily horoscopes, stock prices, and sports scores.
Use of Web technology to deliver database data is growing rapidly, but most Web sites are still outlets for text adorned with graphics. Push technology started as a way to broadcast news and related information (also primarily text and multimedia). Several vendors are now adapting this concept to the delivery of database data as well as applications and applets.
Marimba Inc.'s Castanet system can send any file or group of files (such as the contents of a subdirectory or folder) to a user with the Castanet Tuner installed on the desktop. Corel Corp. and Marimba recently announced that Corel will deliver updates to the next version of its Office Suite using Marimba as the vehicle. If this strategy works, corporate developers should be able to apply similar techniques to updating internal client-based applications. Automating software upgrades is not new, but push technology will probably make it more common.
It is also easy to imagine how push technology can fit into a data warehouse environment. Today's end-user query and analysis tools assume the user sits down and connects to the data warehouse to look for something new (or something previously announced in an email). Push technology can enable users to subscribe to data topics and have the information come to them whenever the information is updated. Tapestry, a new product from a startup named D2K Inc. (as in "data to knowledge" -- see www.d2k.com), joins publish-and-subscribe approaches and push technology to send warehouse data to users in the form of HTML, Excel spreadsheets, and delimited text files. Oracle Corp. and Informix Software Inc. have partnered with TIBCO Inc., a middleware vendor, and plan to incorporate push technology into their DBMS servers. Push technology makes databases more active, but again, capabilities such as agent-based or scheduled report distribution have been provided by various tools before.
The authoring and development tools required to implement and integrate push technology are also in their infancy. Some vendors now require developers to use the vendor's tools to create the content that is pushed to users. If push technology catches on, I suspect the tools we now use to build database applications will add support for the most popular push vehicles. The next major upgrades to Netscape Communications Corp.'s and Microsoft Corp.'s browsers will incorporate push technology, likely giving development tool vendors a stable target to shoot for.
The functional capabilities of push technology have so far been tempered by serious administrative issues that must be resolved -- otherwise users will ignore the technology's potential. Redundant consumption of network bandwidth and disk storage are critical concerns. Vendors are working on techniques to reduce bandwidth consumption, but redundant local storage seems fundamental to the nature of push technology. If you think of push technology as a form of replication, then pushing data to remote mobile users makes sense, but pushing data to deskbound users continuously connected to an Intranet is harder to justify. Local users can just as easily browse a URL that points to a central copy of a document or application. And even with remote or mobile users, push technology's effectiveness depends on user discipline. Users without a continuous connection must tune in to receive updates.
Push technology and traditional pull Web sites (including Intranet sites) make me rethink the relative value of physically possessing information vs. knowing where it is and how to find it. I am a chronic pack rat, but I find myself saving Web files to my hard disk less and less frequently. Push technology seems to counter my newer tendencies, but I still find its application to data delivery intriguing. If you are using push technology to deliver database data, please let me know about your project.