Netscape talks up the future

Though Netscape's current version of Communicator and Netcaster falls farshort of their original "Constellation" vision from a year ago, the companyis once again extolling the virtues of their upcoming Webtop technology,code-named "Gemini." According to the plan, Gemini will provide users witheasy access to "Web data" and will give developers a way to marry legacydata with HTML.

Netscape intends to demonstrate Gemini in two weeks, along with alpha versions of their next servers (code-named "Apollo") and Communicatorsuite (code-named "Mercury"). Sun is collaborating with Netscape on theGemini HTML engine, which will be based on JavaBean components. Netscapeexpects this technology to offer similar capabilities to Microsoft's integrated IE 3.0 ActiveX control, which lets developers embed a full Webbrowser in any application. The benefit, of course, to the Gemini approach,is that it would work on any platform, not just Windows