Java, Shockwave Herald Web of the Future
If the World Wide Web is starting to seem a little inert as a medium for presenting information, you’ll want to check out a couple of new developments on the Internet that offer a good look at what the Web will be like a few years from now, when we all get a heck of a lot more bandwidth carrying it to our door.
If you follow this sort of thing, you’ve probably already heard of Java, by Sun Microsystems Inc., which really does have the ability to turn the World Wide Web into a much more useful and interactive environment. But you may not know about Shockwave for Director, by Macromedia Inc., which makes it easier to bring animation and sound to the Web.
Both of these new products work with Netscape Navigator 2.0, the predominant World Wide Web browser on the Internet today. I recently spent some time playing with both Java and Shockwave, and I encourage you to do likewise if you use Netscape and want a look at where the Web is going.
On the other hand, I can’t suggest that anybody with a dial-up connection will want to use these things on a regular basis. Java and Shockwave are neat-o, all right, but Java- or Shockwave-enabled Web pages take forever to shimmy through, even a fast 28,800-bps modem. Testing these products was so frustratingly slow that I managed to work my way through a couple of large daily newspapers while waiting for various singing and dancing Web pages to get to my screen.
Of the two, Java seems to be the bigger deal. Created by Sun, the leading maker of Internet servers, Java is perhaps most easily explained by example. Let’s say you point your Web browser at a site focusing on stocks and bonds. Instead of the static Web display you might be accustomed to, you find yourself staring at an electronic ticker that shows a moving display of share prices, like the sort of thing you see in brokerage offices or on some buildings. Below that, your portfolio might be dynamically plotted on a graph that changes with market conditions. You might even get updates of news relating to the stocks you own.
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In fact, if you’re using Netscape 2.0, you can visit https://java.sun.com/applets/applets.html and select just such a page. How does it work? The Web page in question contains little programs called Java applets, written in Sun’s Java programming language. Netscape 2.0 is ‘Java-enabled,” meaning that, when confronted with these otherwise invisible applets, it downloads them transparently and puts them immediately to work--regardless of whether you’re using a PC, a Macintosh or a Unix machine.
Since these applets tend to be only about 10kb or 20kb in size, this is theoretically no problem. Unfortunately, I found most Java sites slow as molasses most of the time. Of course, thanks to Windows 95, my creaking 486 and my failure to marry for RAM, most things seem slow on my machine; any minute, in fact, I expect to hear from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Hard Drives because of the merciless flogging mine undergoes daily.
But when I called Sun, a spokesman leaped to the defense of my overworked PC, explaining that slow Java pages are basically due to limited bandwidth; “it’s the pig-through-a-python situation,” as he put it.
So Java is not something you’re going to want to use all the time unless your machine is actually attached to the Internet, and in fact Sun sees it spreading first in the corporate world.
But think of the broader possibilities; the World Wide Web will be a much more dynamic place. Who knows, we might even move toward a world of less powerful personal computers, with most of the computing power and Java-type software residing elsewhere, accessed by users only when the need arises.
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Shockwave, another Netscape plug-in, isn’t built in but can be downloaded for free by visiting https://www.macromedia.com. Installation is a snap (just follow the instructions), after which the software does its thing transparently.
The point of Shockwave, which is still being beta-tested, is to let people use Macromedia Director, a leading multimedia development program, to create multimedia for the World Wide Web. Shockwave comes with a module that turns Director files into Shockwave files.
If you happen to visit a “Shocked” page on the Web, and you happen to be using Netscape, the Shockwave program you downloaded enables you to see little movies, complete with sound.
Right now, “movies” is probably a bit of an overstatement. For instance, head over to a site maintained by M/B Interactive at https://mbinter.com/. Choose their Shocked page and you’ll get some eerie Star Wars-type audio, flashing buttons and an animated globe. From here you can select the Shockwave choice to access several little Shockwave animations that combine sound and moving images into a kind of video art.
Unfortunately, this and the other “Shocked” sites I tried were slow even at fast modem speeds. Still, it’s a look at what’s ahead. I got a glimpse of this future for the Web when I visited a Shocked page at Epicurious, the wonderful food site at https://www.epicurious.com/. The bad news is that it took quite a while to squeeze through my phone line. The good news is that, once it did, it was delightful. The page announced itself with a little baroque-sounding fanfare, and the large central logo was marked by some nifty flying produce.
Was it worth the wait? Once, yes. But without more bandwidth, the shock value quickly wears off.
Daniel Akst welcomes messages at Dan.Akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www. caprica.com/~akst/
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Applets Ahoy
To try out many different Java applets, head over to https://www.applets.com/, where you’ll find a whole collection from all over the Internet. An interesting “Shocked” site you might want to try is Violet Arcana, at https://www.teleport.com/~arcana/vashock/. Here you’ll find a menu of several fun Shockwave “movies.”
