OSUser: BeOS Journal #11 - Netscape Announces Server at Be Developers Conference

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BeOS Journal #11: Netscape Announces Server at Be Developers Conference Scot Hacker, ZDNet 05/12/97 More than 800 developers filled a convention center in San Jose, California, the weekend of May 10 and 11 to confer with Be, Inc., on the coding, marketing, and optimizing of applications for DR9, the imminent preview release of Be's operating system. Keynotes were delivered by Be founder and CEO Jean-Louis Gassée and by Netscape CTO Marc Andreessen. Netscape was on hand to announce a port of its FastTrack Web-server software, which, as the first endorsement of the operating system by a major software-industry vendor, represents a major vote of confidence in Be. Although Gassée has stated that Be has "zero credibility" in the industry and will depend on individual developers and small companies to build applications for the system, he clearly hopes that the Netscape announcement will encourage other companies to develop and port their own software. The combination of Netscape's broad market acceptance and the extremely efficient and fast BeOS has the potential to make an excellent Internet serving platform, giving the Web-server market an option that combines the robustness of UNIX with the user-friendliness of the Mac OS, without the bulk of Windows NT. Also demonstrated at the show was an alternative Web-server software package called Charlotte, from Purity Software. Unlike FastTrack, Charlotte has been designed specifically to take full advantage of the BeOS' native symmetric-multiprocessing, preemptive-multitasking environment. Early demos of Charlotte showed it to be sophisticated and powerful Web-server software, capable of functioning on a primary server for Internet Service Providers. During the keynote address, a Be programmer demonstrated Replicator technology, a component architecture, similar to the ActiveX and OpenDoc architectures, designed to let applications communicate with each other and the operating system. Replicator is extremely efficient, however; adding an HTML object to the desktop required a mere seven lines of code. Another programmer demonstrated the support for international character sets now built into the OS, by typing Japanese Kanji directly into StyledEdit, the bundled word processor. Support for Java and OpenGL are also part of DR9, although no Java demonstrations were done during the keynote. BeatWare Software was present to demonstrate its upcoming productivity suites. BeBasics features a word processor and spreadsheet program, and BeStudio includes paint and draw tools. Each suite requires less than 2 MB of disk space and is designed to handle common tasks with tremendous power. BeatWare's word processor, code-named ReggaeWrite, was shown flowing 880 pages of text around a moving image in real time, utilizing the BeOS' multithreaded environment. The company is a proponent of "light, fast, and powerful," offering an alternative to prevalent "bloated" office suites. Other companies demonstrating software were Adamation, which showed StudioA, a multimedia-authoring package with sophisticated capabilities, and Remote Control systems, which demonstrated the multitrack-audio-mixing and -manipulation capabilities of the OS. Both companies' products take full advantage of the BeOS' efficiency and tight design. Remote Control was able to drag out arbitrary paths on-screen and have a 16-track sound stream flow through the audience according to that path in real time. Developers were given CD-ROMs containing an pre-release version of the imminent Preview Release of BeOS. Gassée plans to deliver a million copies of the BeOS into the hands of end users by the end of the year, by giving away the operating system with new Mac OS clones and over the Internet, and five million copies by the end of 1998. Plans for a port to the Intel architecture have been rumored for a while, and Gassée came very close to stating those plans publicly at the conference, stating that Be was "processor-agnostic" and pointing to the large number of machines running Intel chips. |
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