Partners to "push" Java
Two Java vendors, Dimension X and Marimba, partner to make it easier to design "pushed" Internet information.
The companies today announced that Marimba will incorporate Dimension X's Liquid Motion Pro, a multimedia authoring tool, with its own Bongo development environment, Dimension X CEO Karl Jacob said.
The union of the two technologies could make it easier for artists and designers to create "channels" for Marimba's Castanet, a system for broadcasting information, such as news headlines and stock quotes, as well as software, to users' desktops on the Internet.
The deal is an important distribution deal for Dimension X's Liquid Motion Pro tool, which generates Java multimedia animations. But the pact could also help spawning more Castanet channels, a critical factor in raising the profile of Marimba's broadcasting among corporations and consumers. PointCast, which pioneered the method of pushing--or automatically transmitting--information over the Net, has far more channels on its system.
Currently, Marimba's Bongo development environment allows developers to build user interfaces for an application easily, but it still requires Java programming skills to create multimedia content. In contrast, Liquid Motion Pro is a point-and-click tool that requires little or no programming experience, making it better suited for non-technical users. Bundled together, the tools will allow developers to publish a Castanet channel without doing any Java coding.
"You can do the user interface in Bongo [for applications], but you still have to do a lot of Java programming," Jacob said. "With Liquid Motion Pro, it's a point-and-click deal. Bongo doesn't really have any multimedia capabilities. It wasn't designed for that."
Liquid Motion isn't the only multimedia authoring tool for creating Castanet channels though. Macromedia has announced that developers can do the same with its Director tool, though Macromedia's tool requires additional programming when used with Castanet.