The Future

The Web is evolving into the largest information repository in the world. There will be a continued strong demand for tools, utilities, and applications so that the user can access this information with greater speed and efficiency. Web application development will continue to mature to satisfy the user’s demand. The development time on the Web is much shorter than other development environments. The Web developer will continue to look for tools to provide more functionality and yet be flexible to use in many different environments. Three evolving technologies—Java servlets, XML, and CORBA—will play a very significant role in aiding the developer in heterogeneous environments in the near future.

Java Servlets

Server-side scripting will continue to evolve into object-oriented, server-side programming using Java and C++. Once Java becomes truly platform independent, it will become the server-side programming language of choice because the programmer will not care what OS or what database he is interfacing.

One of the early frustrations with Java is the performance on the client side. It took much too long to run a Java applet on a client. Today’s trend is to run Java on the server side (servlets). Here, the developer enjoys the advantages of Java while avoiding slow download times to the client.

The secret’s out: Java isn’t just for programming client-side applets that run in Web browsers or for writing Internet applications. The simple, flexible servlet API brings the power of Java to your servers, too. Java is a great platform for writing the server side of your Web-based application. The same features that make Java a better platform for writing client applications make it better for writing servers. Your server applications will benefit from its type safety and other rapid development features, even more than your client applications did, because multithreading support is built into the Java platform.

Java makes it easy to develop and deploy all parts of a professional, maintainable, distributed system application. The servlet API provides you the fastest way to start using JavaServer technology in your networked applications. You can start with applications that involve clients and a single server, and gradually create multitier enterprise applications that integrate the power and flexibility of Java throughout your existing network, because Java servlets run on the software and hardware you’ve already installed.

XML

One of the biggest limitations of HTML has been the presentation and organization of its content. XML allows developers to easily describe and deliver rich, structured data from any application in a standard, consistent manner. XML does not replace HTML; rather, it is a complementary format. XML is becoming the vehicle for structured data on the Web, fully complementing HTML, which is used to present the data. By breaking structured data away from presentation, Web developers can begin to build the next generation of Web applications.

Learning to author XML and manipulate XML data sources will enable you as an HTML author to supply your Web pages with content that is more intelligent and more dynamic. Marking up data using XML also enables you to create data sources that can be accessed in a number of different ways for a number of different purposes, making interoperability between applications and your Web site possible.

XML also holds the promise of becoming a standardized mechanism for the exchange of data as well as documents. For example, XML may become a way for databases from vendors to exchange information across the Internet.

CORBA

As object-oriented programming takes hold for Web development, there will be a continued evolution toward object-oriented content such as object database management systems (ODBMS). CORBA will play a significant role in the evolution of object-oriented distributed content.

Distributed objects enhance security, fault tolerance, configuration management, and code reuse. It’s possible to take advantage of these attractive qualities by incorporating existing information services into a Web server based on the CORBA open industry standard for distributed objects.

The CORBA put forth by the Object Management Group (OMG) combines distributed processing with object orientation. It is the world’s first multivendor, industry-supported, distributed object standard. CORBA provides a standard, seamless, transparent way to distribute objects across multiple platforms and operating systems. The architecture is isolated from the actual transport protocols—such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX), and Systems Network Architecture (SNA)—allowing an open-ended standard.

Finally, current technologies for implementing distributed systems include sockets, remote procedure calls (RPCs), a distributed computing environment (DCE), or middleware oriented methods (MOMs). Each of these alternatives affords a different level of complexity and success, and nearly all have been wrapped into object-oriented class libraries. However, none of these methods were specifically designed to seamlessly integrate distributed objects in a client/server environment, so they don’t have an intrinsic concept of object passing (by value) or remote inheritance.