Mike this one is for you!
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biz.yahoo.com
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I don't think this matters one bit to IATV, at least not on the client end (won't change what goes in the set-top box.) I have no earthly clue what is running on the IATV servers. If the IATV servers were to use traditional web-server style technology (which I doubt seriously they do) then this technology may lower development costs and development time. Since I don't believe (but I'm guessing so I could easily be wrong) that IATV is using normal web-servers as their back end (probably they built some specialized server), this won't impact them at all... but this is just a guess based on one reading of a press release, and a press release is no substitute for a technical white paper.
Longer answer, more of a ramble on Java and what I think this technology is (and thus it's not very related to IATV): Java as used in Java applets has its strengths and weaknesses. Strength is that the app runs on the client machine, so there is no CPU load on the server other than sending the code down (and any future requests the applet makes from the server). Weakness is that for security reasons there are lots of things that java applets cannot do, such as read from or write to local files.
I don't believe that Java on the server end will allow web developers to deliver any functionality that they couldn't already deliver in the past, but there's probably something about it that will make life easier for these developers. Right now, anyone can use C++, C, Perl, Python, or just about any language as a back-end scripting language. When a dynamic page is needed, the web server invokes the program with some parameters, and the program delivers HTML code as its output. This HTML is passed onto the user. An easy way of seeing this work is a stock quote form... the user types in a symbol, which is sent to the web server, then passed to the program, then the program looks up the current price, generates an HTML document with the current price in it, and sends the whole thing down to the browser.
From reading the document, this Java/Server technology is designed for use in high-powered systems where the applications aren't simple like getting a stock quote but rather interface with multiple data sources to generate the web pages. Managing all the interfaces can be a pain in the arse, and if the back end isn't a simple server but is a complex array of servers which have to serve multiple different kinds of clients (some web-based, some non web-based) then it can be a difficult programming task to manage it. My read is that Sun has built-in ways to easily encapsulate this complicated mess and greatly simplify the development time needed to generate these applications. So it doesn't give any new functionality, but it makes it easier to implement certain things.
However the technology only seems to apply to webservers, although there may be a way to apply it to other client/server architectures (probably is, but without actually seeing the product it's difficult to judge... press releases aren't technical white papers.) I'm betting that IATV developed their own proprietary servers and thus won't need this technology, although presumably they could use it in their next version of the server. I have no idea what sort of technology IATV is using on the back end so I don't want to speculate.
-Mike |
