By: Bjorn Soderstrom,
To the annual conference, the OS/2 User Group had invited an american guest from
Innoval System Solutions, Mr. Dan Porter, who is a well-known name in OS/2 circuits.
The Innoval company is writing software intended for the customized and
corporate market, mostly OS/2 but they have also a small but very interesting supply
of OS/2 products on the regular consumer market. The E-mail software Post Road Mailer
is one example. In one area of computing the Innoval company have had the time to
get themselves an important and market leading position and that is in Java developing.
According to Dan Porter Java is very important today, especially in the corporate
market where it's already is established, but also for coming products for ordinary
consumers. The difficulties with Java so far has been quite big and much of the
working time they have spent has been to sort what tools to use. The talk Write
once, Run everywhere is far from true yet Dan said. One of the major problems have
been that the components that are used is rather badly documented. If several companies
cooperates about the components but is not making them well documented enough, there
is going to be some misunderstandings about the use and implementations, and that
is going to produce incompatible products in the end. With that in mind You must
realize that Java programs for the consumer market still has a long way to go before
it's reality. Dan pointed out that the other languages that is used to code software
has also been on the market for several years before You can say that they a mature
so this problem is not special for Java in any case. The biggest problem is that
some parts of the computer industry doesn't want Java to be the language for the
future to produce platform independent software but that is a completely different
question.
For us who are using OS/2, Java is already implemented into the operating system
and works quite well but according to Dan that has not only been an advantage. In
the developing phase Innoval has noticed that not everything in Java works from
ground up in OS/2 so some additional work has to be done though Java is part of
the operation system. The Java software that Innoval has been on the market for
a while now is the J Street Mailer. For the time being Innoval uses mostly the Borland
J Builder on Win NT for the developing after testing most tools in the business.
The platform where Java is performing best now is on IBM's AIX where it's performing
excellent according to Dan.
On the other hand on other UNIX-systems including Linux it has given a lot lower
results. Innoval's plans for the future is to try to establish better and more extensive
standards for Java, then the results will going to be much better than now. Graphics
and printouts are far from good at this point. Dan also mentioned the possibility
to turn Java programs into native binary-code software and there are product to
come that now is under tests in laboratories and they could very well be important
on the market tomorrow.
Innoval is also well known for performing cross platform development, something
that more companies should perform. The WebWilly Watch is available in versions
both for Win32 and OS/2 with almost the same behavior and functionality. It's a
program for handing of bookmarks and logs from Your Web Browser in a way that no
browser on the market can do as well as WebWilly Watch. The program is very cheap
and does surfing on the Net a lot easier. Another company that is doing cross platform
is Stardock with it's Object Desktop. Now when OD is going to come with version
2, it's also going to come out for Win32. It will probably turn into a big success
for Stardock as the desktop of Windows is almost rudimentary compared to OS/2 even
without Object Desktop. A much bigger problem in the industry now is the economy
according to Dan, a lot of users is not willing to pay for software and as a result
of the fact that the operation systems and Web-readers contains so much nowadays,
it's hard to motivate a user to buy an external E-mail software if hi or she is
satisfied with the builtin function in Netscape or any other reader. Then they don't
have the motivation to buy something extra. That fact has almost destroyed the OS/2
market and it will also affect the Windows market in the long run. The competition
is going to be very low and that is leading to highpriced and not so good products.
Dan also suggested that the J Street Mailer could be translated to foreign languages,
one of them Swedish, and that works could possibly be done within the Swedish OS/2
User Group.
The Swedish IBM gave the meeting a very interesting and important presentation
of the Y 2000 problem from Leif Engdahl. If You have a system that you are using
and want to continue to use after the millenium change it's a must that it's going
to work also after that date. This is not a particular problem related to OS/2 or
IBM or even to the Information Technology Industry, it can be a problem with a lot
of products that contains electronic equipment of any kind. According to Leif Engdahl
there are still surprisingly many companies that has not yet realized the potential
of this problem. An OS/2 system is not Y 2000 ready directly out of the box but
with all the available FixPaks for the operating system and all the sub systems
like TCP/IP, MPTS and PEER, it's ready to use for the future.
IBM has produced a remarkable site that informs the users about this problem,
http://www.software.ibm.com/year2000/,
and even other customers than IBM's own has a lot the receive when IBM is very open
even to competing products in their usual way. That is probably the result of fact
that they deliver complete systems and not only separate products. The companies
that is going to throw out old systems will probably be surprised when they are
going to notice that there is not people and competence to be found on the market
when everybody is asking for the same services. It's hardly economical or wise the
do a change of system only for this reason, it's should be motivated of other reasons
in that case. It's also a misunderstanding said Leif Engdahl that only the date
and time 1/1 2000 that should be the problem, instead there are systems that could
stop working already when 1999 starts and even after the millenium date as well.
Finally Kim Isaksen and Kristoffer Miklas from the Swedish and Danish IBM showed
a little of the coming strategy and products that are coming from IBM. The WorkSpace
On Demand that has not been any success in Sweden yet but is the banking community
abroad is coming in a new version late in october. The biggest news is that it's
going to support Win32 (not immediately) and NC-computers. There are also a much
improved setup of machine classes and other installation subjects. Now when IBM
is launching Java and Network Computing very hard, Kristoffer Miklas told the meeting
what he coming Java-based operating system is going to be used for. Something that
also is on it's way is a completely new version of Warp Server witch should reach
the market in the first quarter next year. It will contain a lot of new an interesting
technique that is borrowed from IBM's AIX (UNIX). Everybody who uses servers based
on UNIX knows that they are much better than PC-based systems in terms of technique
and reliability and if You could have a new server with those features in combination
with the unbeatable object technique from OS/2's desktop it should be a very strong
card on the market.