Stock up on intranet tools
By Dan Orzech
When Boyd Nolan and Tim Jones look into the future, all they see are Web browsers.
"We don't have time to work out the details of connectivity between products from different vendors," says Boyd Nolan, senior specialist engineer, Boeing Aerospace Operations and Aircraft Support.
|
Nolan is a lead engineer at Boeing Aerospace Operations and Aircraft Support, a subsidiary of Seattle, WA.-based The Boeing Corporation. Jones is a Web developer in NationsBanc Montgomery Securities' Application Architecture Group in San Francisco. Both companies recently decided that all new application development will use the Web browser as the standard interface.
At Boeing Aerospace, Nolan says, "we have started down the path of redeploying all our core systems using Web technology."
For NationsBanc, "The Web is our deployment platform of choice," says Jones.
What's happening at these two companies is by no means unusual. The last year or two has seen an overwhelming trend toward the use of a Web browser as the user interface of choice. And that means that developers must pay close attention to the new crop of Web-based development tools.
Tools, just the facts
The market for Windows-based Web authoring products is expected to grow by more than 32% a year between now and 2002, according to Joan-Carol Brigham, a research manager in Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp.'s Internet program. More than six million products will be sold in 2002, IDC predicts (see chart, "Growth of Web authoring tools").
As in other realms, Microsoft dominates much of the low-end market here: 50% of NT server customers are active users of FrontPage, according to IDC. And Microsoft, Netscape, and other major vendors will continue to bundle tools for creating simple Web pages for free.
"I don't believe that one tool that does everything exists. We want to be able to decide what the best of breed is for each particular type of tool," says Tim Jones, Web developer at NationsBanc.
|
But the continued success of other tools "shows that 'free' doesn't always mean 'better'" says Dan Keldsen, webmaster at the Delphi Group, in Boston.
As far as HTML development is concerned, no matter which tool you choose, one thing is certain: As the amount of information published in the form of Web pages continues to grow--both on intranets and on the Internet--so will the demand for HTML authoring tools.
Which will it be: HTML vs. XML, or HTML and XML
There is one uncertainty on the road ahead though: The future of HTML itself. XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which allows you to encode much more information in a document, has been widely discussed as HTML's successor.
Already, Netscape's next version of its Navigator browser--due later this year--will read XML. And XML is starting to appear in other tools, such as San Francisco-based Autonomy's Agentware Knowledge Server. This tool can automatically add XML tags to documents so they can be retrieved by search engines or knowledge management applications.
But HTML--with its millions of pages on the Web, and countless more on corporate intranets--is not likely to disappear anytime soon. This has left vendors and industry groups such as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which is responsible for the HTML standard, wrestling with the relationship between XML and HTML. One possibility proposed at a recent W3C conference on the future of HTML, is to update the current HTML standard with a new version, which would be based upon a suite of XML tag-sets, essentially making HTML a subset of XML.
But focusing on XML merely as a replacement for HTML misses the point, says David Megginson, a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML working group, and author of Structuring XML documents (Prentice-Hall, 1998. While HTML is an easy way for humans to publish information on the Web, XML's strength is that it lets applications talk with each other. In fact, says Megginson, most XML will be invisible to end users.
AT A GLANCE:
Boeing Aerospace Operations and Aircraft Support
The company: A subsidiary of The Boeing Company, Boeing Aerospace Operations' 2,250 employees provide technical support to NASA, the U.S. military, and The Boeing Company.
The problem: Boeing aerospace wanted to give users access to a wide variety of applications from its Web browsers, without spending a huge amount of resources to do the job.
The solution: An all-Microsoft software toolkit lets IT focus on building applications instead of figuring out how to connect tools from different vendors.
The IT infrastructure: Microsoft Visual InterDev, Exchange, InterNet Explorer, and FrontPage. Gateway PCs and Digital Equipment Alpha database servers.
|
|
XML's big advantage, according to Megginson, is that it can be used to create specific sets of tags for specific tasks or industries. Already, standards have been agreed upon for mathematical and chemical symbols, and groups ranging from automotive engineers to librarians to the Newspaper Association of America have standards in the works. The standards with the widest impact will likely be those for electronic commerce and EDI, where Megginson predicts some consensus will emerge within the year.
Coming out from behind the firewall
Another change that promises to make life easier for both intranet developers and users is the growing acceptance of directory services based on open standards such as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).
An open directory service will save users the annoyance of having to log in first to the network, and then to each separate application they want to use. For developers, it means not having to write custom code to authenticate users for each application.
But security becomes more complicated as companies start allowing business partners or customers access to corporate data by extending their applications onto an extranet. "Right now, we're pretty well hidden behind our firewall," says NationsBanc's Jones. "But as we start doing business with some of our external clients, security will become a big issue."
|
