The Road to Cairo Goes Through Nashville

At the recent Internet developers conference in San Francisco, California,Microsoft unveiled "Nashville," part of a sweeping plan to moveInternet and intranet features into the core of Windows. Nashville is a shellthat integrates a Web browser, a disk browser, and business software such asWord and Excel. This shell should be available in the third quarter of this yearas an upgrade, or extension, to Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Nashville is partof Microsoft's commitment to use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as a keytechnology and will work with Microsoft's long-term plans to create a unifiedproduct that lets you integrate client-side applications with HTML on thedesktop.

Key Components
Nashville has several key components, and realizing how they interoperate isimportant. Let's start from the perspective of Microsoft's Internet Explorer(IE) Web browser. One of Nashville's main components is the ActiveX controltechnologies from the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) team. ActiveX controlsare the same OLE custom controls (OCX) from Visual Basic (VB), Access, andVisual FoxPro with some new interfaces to support DocObjects, for example.Indeed, you'll be able to use most OCX objects as ActiveX controls.

With Nashville, you will design an HTML page and use ActiveX controls toreference external objects and programs. If the users don't have the necessaryActiveX controls on their machines, they'll be able to download the neededcontrols on the fly and install them. These ActiveX controls then operate likeany other OCX, but in the context of an HTML document. Authoring ActiveXcontrols is important because until now, you had to use Visual C++ (VC++) tocreate OCXs. Microsoft says that you will now be able to create these controlsusing VC++, the Jakarta Java toolkit, and even VB5.

Getting Java applets to interoperate with ActiveX controls is a neat trick.Until now, the standard Java environments treated Java applets as fullyprotected, sealed-off worlds, hidden from the quirks of the local host platform.Microsoft and Sun MicroSystems have dealt with this isolation by extending theJava virtual machine model. Now, all Java classes are available to componentobject model (COM) and OLE objects as native COM interfaces. The opposite isalso true; all COM and OLE interfaces appear as Java classes to Java applets.So, interoperating among Java and OLE, COM, and ActiveX will be no problem.Imagine being able to take advantage of OLE objects from within a Java applet.

Onward to IE3
Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 3.0 (IE3) will be the firstplatform to support this interoperability: The IE3 Web browser will supportActiveX controls, the VBScript language, and Java objects and JavaScript.Nashville's potential goes even further: You'll have a Web browser that is alsoan OLE object container. IE3 will let you access native DocFiles (OLE-structuredstorage files) and will activate the host application for you. Imagine thisscenario: You have a local Web page with a hotlink pointing to an Excelworksheet. You select the hotlink, and IE3 immediately takes on the appearanceof Excel and loads the native worksheet for you.

This interoperability is a key point because it irrevocably joins the HTMLsystem with the native file formats that we've used up to now. So moving betweensuch applications as Word and Excel via hotlinked HTML pages is just a matter ofpointing and clicking. Microsoft is making the most of its existing OLEDocObjects container and storage methods, taking them straight into the HTML andintranet world. Phase one of this migration is the merging of HTML and read andwrite documents into one Explorer shell. This merging happens in IE3, which isdue with the release of Windows NT 4.0. The second stage is Nashville.

If you think about this strategy carefully, you realize that having a Webbrowser, a disk browser, and various tools (Word, Excel) for day-to-day datadoesn't make sense. Integrating all these functions into one shell does makesense. This approach doesn't let you know where anything is coming from because,to be honest, you don't need to know. It's all data.

Nashville--Integration Is All
A good way to think of the Nashville shell is as a way to merge the IE3environment, Office applications, and any other OLE DocObject-compliant toolsyou have with the desktop Explorer. In other words, Nashville promises a totallyseamless desktop integration of your information with the Internet environment.Indeed, this shell promises to go even further. The screen shots shown at theInternet developers conference imply that Nashville will integrate the ExchangeClient with the forthcoming News Service and other services. (You can see anexample of a Nashville display in screen 1.) Rumor has it that Microsoft istargeting the forthcoming Office97 release at this integrated shell environment.

Using Nashville, Microsoft demonstrated how you can move among disparateinformation feeds in a proper read and write fashion without knowing where orhow something is stored. As you can see in screen 2, when you open a version ofIE in Nashville, you will see the tree down the left side and an active windowon the right. The contents of the window on the right will depend on what you'rebrowsing.

If you think about it, this integration is especially important for Cairo'sdebut next year. Microsoft will finally roll out its NT Object Filing System(NTOFS) and NT Distributed Filing System (NTDFS) for servers. With these tools,you probably won't know where something is stored, nor will you care. So theNashville wave of integrating everything on the client side into one seamlessinformation retrieval and editing environment lays the foundation for Cairo. Infact, it was getting difficult to see how Microsoft could easily transition theWin95 shell into such a DFS environment if applications such as Office remainedapplication-centric (as they are today), rather than data-centric (as they needto be and will be under Nashville).

Further Enhancements
Because Microsoft is embracing HTML so wholeheartedly, including HTML as thedesktop design and implementation environment makes a lot of sense. Microsoftdemonstrated how you can change your desktop's look and feel by using embeddedHTML code and HTML forms to redefine window designs. Using ActiveX controls todesign HTML forms promises to be a crucial piece of technology. In "ExploringCairo: Forms Database Engine" (Windows NT Magazine, January1996), I speculated on the need for a Cairo forms engine based on OLEuser-rebuildable objects and collections of forms. Well, I was right on themoney but about 90 degrees out of phase. Instead of using a registry store forthese things, you can store them as active HTML forms using ActiveX controls.

Microsoft also demonstrated a sort of SuperPlusPack feature that lets youdefine an active desktop using HTML and ActiveX controls. Imagine designing anactive Web page and then making it your screen backdrop. The possibilities areendless--a set of realtime data feeds indicating production outputs in afactory, the latest hot news from inside a company, a realtime news feed, etc.

Other Pieces
Microsoft also announced a few minor pieces to go into the Nashville packageto spice up an already potentially red-hot package. In addition to a plethora ofActiveX controls, Nashville will have an Integrated Services Digital Network(ISDN) wizard, Direct MPEG drivers, a desktop tool (like the remote desktopfacility currently found in Systems Management Server--SMS) for data and audioconferencing over LANs and the Internet, a Win95 peer server version of theInternet Web server engine, and improvements to user profiles and ratings.

The Way Forward
Once you look carefully at the implications of ActiveX, the interoperabilityof OLE and COM and Java, and the new HTML-centric mindset, you see thatMicrosoft has a clear path to finally deliver its grandinformation-at-your-fingertips plan. Until now, Microsoft's vision has consistedof big promises and arm-waving with some smart demonstration software. However,Microsoft is now committed to using HTML, ActiveX, and the Nashville extensionsto Win95 and NT 4.0 to deliver on these promises.

If Microsoft can come through on these plans (Brad Silverberg, senior vicepresident of Internet platform and tools, was confident they would happen in thetime outlined), Microsoft has finally defined the focus it needs for the turn ofthe century. And this focused direction comes not a minute too soon.