Many Parts Make A Clever Net Hound
The Age
Tuesday February 18, 1997
AS COMMERCE and industry turn increasingly towards the use of intranets and the Internet, control of these tidal waves of information becomes vitally important.
For example, engineers need to know that the specification sheet they have is the latest version. Purchasing officers need to know instantly about price changes in the commodities they are ordering.
One clever answer is OpenDoc and Apple's Cyberdog software, which allows creation of documents that constantly and automatically update themselves as information arrives. It's far from all that this component software can do, but it's one of its most valuable attributes.
One of the others, incidentally, is to play guard dog. In its e-mail and news guises, Cyberdog can be taught to screen messages. It will, for instance, trash all e-mail from designated senders and will similarly kill newsgroup postings from people you decide are objectionable.
OpenDoc is supported by CI (for Component Integration) Labs of California, a non-profit association of more than 300 computer industry companies, including Apple, IBM and Adobe, and is now regarded as the de facto component standard. It was originally written for the Macintosh but is now available to run on Windows 95 and NT as well as OS/2 Warp and AIX (a version of Unix).
Cyberdog is essentially a collection of OpenDoc parts that allow access to the Internet and, at the same time, interactivity with other OpenDoc parts in the document.
You start with a blank page called a container, which comes up on the computer screen with a palette beside it. From the palette you may drag and drop into the container a series of OpenDoc parts, known as live objects. These might be a spreadsheet part, a graphing part, a spellchecker and a word processor, plus Cyberdog.
Each of these parts is interactive. The spreadsheet part can talk to the graphing part, and the intranet browser part, and so on. Each might have been written by a different software developer, but because they are Open Doc parts and comply with that architecture, they share a standard method of information exchange.
Now for the clever bit.
Suppose you wish to make a document to review your share portfolio. You can use the word processor to write the text and the spreadsheet to set up your share folder. If you link that document, through Cyberdog, to the stock exchange ticker service on the Internet, the share prices and other relevant information will be updated as often as the stock ticker changes.
If you then send that document to someone else who has an Internet connection, the information will also be updated all the time by Cyberdog. Transmission of the document over the Internet is easy because the Live Objects parts are small and compact. Downloading is quick and easy.
Similarly on a company intranet. Intranet servers are set up to exchange information, but one of the problems is that information quickly goes stale. Damage can be done if an executive decision is made on the basis of out-of-date information. But if documents are made using Live Objects, then each time something changes anywhere in the database it may be automatically updated right across the intranet.
Cyberdog is a clever hound. Macworld dubbed it "a five-star concept," saying it was where the Internet should be heading.
"Integrating the Internet into the documents we work with and offering Net access across applications using dynamically loaded components seems natural and intuitive. Once again Apple and Macintosh are on the leading edge," the reviewer said.
Microsoft has challenged the OpenDoc technology with OLE/
Active X, but it is much less elegant and allows only one embedded object to be live at a time when, with OpenDoc and Cyberdog, everything is always live.
Cyberdog is a collection of OpenDoc parts: a Net browser, an FTP part, an e-mail part, a Notebook to organise and store Internet addresses (e-mails, URLs, references to text and sound documents) which makes finding your frequent sites a simple click of the mouse. It's good in the Internet environment; for an intranet user it could save hours of frustrating toil.
It allows Internet files to be dragged and dropped right on to your desktop, or you can copy URLs to the desktop for a later visit. You may even embed URLs in your e-mail. It's also possible to create buttons which, like knobs on a magic door, will open up any Net site you wish. Live views of Web sites may also be embedded in the Cyberdocuments you create.
Cyberdog's Web browser is efficient but plain. Indeed, that's the way of all its features so far; more work is to be done. On the other hand it is not blowsy with code-bloat. The Cyberdog runs quickly and on a minimum of electronic Pal.
OpenDoc is contained within the computer's operating system (it, and the latest release of Cyberdog, will be included in the next release of the MacOS, System 7.6, due to be released in Australia next month, or it may be downloaded now, free, from the World Wide Web).
Point your browser at http://www.opendoc.apple.com// and follow the pointers.
For a tutorial, go to Cyberdog Pound at www.microserve.net/dhughes/
Garry Barker is contactable at rekrab@iaccess.com.au
© 1997 The Age