Internet World Expo Fall 96 Report- by Jon Winters

I recently had a chance to visit the Internet World Expo Fall 96 produced by Mecklermedia for joint work/reporting purposes. This convention's organizers claim it to be the world's best Internet related show. Of course, I spent time looking for OS/2 related Internet news, and here is my report:

The convention center was "massive"; at one point, it was booths for as far as you could see.

I'm sad to report though, that in all those booths, I did not see one single computer running OS/2 anywhere at the show. The folks at the IBM booth told me (with a smile), "They are letting us run Win95 now."

The IBM folks also suggested that I look at the JAVA part of the IBM booth since the Java stuff should run on OS/2. I took their advice and asked a lot of other vendors about possible Java versions of their software. It seems like there will be a lot of Java based software for us next year. Hopefully the IBMers were right and it will all "run on OS/2".

While at the show, I was invited to attend a luncheon by the Intel folks about "connected applications". The most interesting thing there was definitely Marimba and the Castanet tuner, transmitter, and bongo development environment. I've been running Marimba on my computer at work (Win95) for a couple of months now and it is a great new way to distribute software. Basically, you write a "channel" for your company and that channel is automatically updated at specified times. It is a totally open system that gives you a lot of freedom. From the user perspective software updated by Marimba is always current and up to date; a true "install and forget" system.

Marimba is being ported for OS/2 and should be ready soon. It is not 100% Java though because it needs to do some things that Java is not allowed to do. Keep an eye on Marimba. The developers have partnered with Netscape and are being used a lot in Constellation.

Constellation is Netscape's next big thing. They didn't have anything at the show about it but you can mine their home page for a preview. In a nutshell, Constellation will be a desktop or partial desktop that runs on top of your operating system and has both traditional applications and special "connected" apps. (Marimba is doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff here.) You should be able to share a Constellation desktop between your OS/2 machine at work and at home and even a friend's Mac or Windows box. Your Constellation desktop should be available wherever you are and eliminate a lot of confusion for mobile professionals or anyone who uses more than one computer.

Netscape told me that their popular WWW servers won't get ported to the OS/2 platform unless IBM or someone else does it. As you know, IBM ported Navigator 2.02 to OS/2 with help from Netscape. On a more positive note, I was told that the OS/2 version of Communicator (Netscape's new browser/communications suite, aka Galileo) will have all the functionality of the Windows version and then some (eg. VoiceType).

I spent time with the Lotus SmartSuite folks at the show. They assured me that SmartSuite '97 will be feature for feature the same as the Win95 version and gave me a demonstration of the software. It is HTTP-upload and FTP compatible when publishing documents to a web server and conversion from anything to HTML is a snap. Very nice indeed. While I didn't get an exact date on when the initial OS/2 version of SmartSuite is shipping, I'm sold on the product. It is very nice. (editor's note: By press time, Lotus had told us that SmartSuite '96 for OS/2 was shipping. It should be available to stores near you soon. )

After seeing all the stuff at the show that is being developed in Java I would recommend to readers to download and try some Java apps. You're going to be seeing a lot of them in the future.


Jon Winters is the owner and operator of Obscura! With the help of a few good friends he is up to all kinds of mischief on the web.

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