Microsoft Corp rushed out its announcement out on Friday determined to pre-empt Netscape Communication Corp’s plan to turn OMG Corba-IIOP into a de facto standard, which the Mountain View company hopes it will do this week by making public its intent to embed IIOP in Navigator and all Netscape servers. Throwing the fat into fire, our sister publication OnLine Reporter says Netscape will also join OMG, effectively throwing its weight behind Corba and getting an object strategy in return. The move was expected to create a dilemma for Microsoft which – with its competing COM/ActiveX object strategy – has never been what one might call a friend of the OMG; Friday’s events may turn that expectation on its head. Microsoft aside, OMG is hoping Netscape’s move will make JavaSoft look stupid, it says, since JavaSoft has so far refused to adopt IIOP as its native interoperability method, much to OMG’s chagrin. It’s hoping getting upstaged by Netscape will bring JavaSoft to its senses, particularly in view of the fact that JavaSoft parent Sun Microsystems has been one of the OMG’s heaviest supporters. It says, Maybe now it’ll stop bringing up rathole technical arguments and see the big picture, which of course is who wins the objects war – OMG or Microsoft, a picture significantly enlarged by Friday’s events. OMG boss Chris Stone, tracked down at his vacation hideaway, was tickled pink at the prospect of Netscape’s move. Think of it, he said, Corba on 38 million seats. That’s a lot of objects. He is confident that Netscape’s adoption of IIOP will get the
attention of lots of ISVs. They’ll say, ‘IIOP, IIOP. What’s that? We’d better find out. It should be no surprise to anyone that Netscape will use the all-Java Corba-compliant IIOP implementation created by PostModern Computing, the promising little ORB house now owned by Visigenic Software Inc which Netscape recently bought a piece of. Last week Visigenic, which was started by Informix co-founder Roger Sippl, changed the name of that implementation from the fetching Black Widow that PostModern had dubbed it to VisiBroker for Java, ostensibly to create a consistent corporate image – though the fact that Black Widow is also the name of a mythical virus may have had something to do with it. IIOP won’t appear in Netscape products
until Galileo, once Dogbert, its next-generation Navigator which is six to 12 months out, and in Orion, its next-generation of SuiteSpot servers due 18 months from now. It also plans to ship IIOP-compliant Netscape Internet Foundation Class as part of what it’s calling its Netscape One open network environment. Netscape’s decision to go with Black Widow was buy or build. It had been doing its own IIOP implementation called DOP and abandoned it after it cut the Visigenic deal. It will be interesting to see whether Netscape backs OMG’s designs with respect to HTTP. It would like to see HTTP and IIOP merged to create the next-generation HTTP.
