Folks,
    We've updated our JAVA demo and we have some notes from the JavaOne
conference:

1)  DISC has a new updated Java based/TurboImage demo that retrieves both
an Image Master (Prospects) and an Image Detail set (Activity).  The new
demo is still at www.disc.com/demo/turboimage/ip/smjava.html.  For people
who had problems with the previous demo, we traced the problem down to
earlier versions of  Netscape  You should use Netscape 3.01 as previous
versions have some problems with newer Java applets.


2)  DISC recently participated in the JavaOne conference and has the
following observations:

The conference was attended by 9000 technical developers.  Some very cool
Java demos were shown of real-time applications in development at NASA
and Lockheed Martin today to have the Hubble telescope run by Java.
 Their goal is to have the 1998 servicing mission of the telescope be
controlled completely by Java.  The currently showed a Web page written
in Java with real-time telemetry of the space Shuttle and of the Hubble
telescope.   The other cool space related demo was with a Mars
lander/vehicle prototype at the Jet Propulsion Lab controlled by real
time Java applications running over the Web.  This is scheduled for the
next Mars probe launch in 2001.
Sun estimates there are nearly 300,000 Java developers in the United
States today, and growing every minute.   Of companies that employ 5,000
people or more, 60% have applications under way in Java and 35% of those
have based their corporate strategies on using Java to build mission
critical applications.
Sun reiterated the three most significant points of Java that make it a
viable programming solution:
Portability: "Write Once, Run Anywhere" technology is really being pushed
by Sun.  Of course, this poses some interesting questions to the
TurboImage community concerning using the native TurboImage api.  DISC is
interfacing  Java to our open system api (OmniAccess) which then
interfaces to TruboImage so that Omnidex customers have true "Write Once,
Run Anywhere" capabilities should they decide to move their future
applications off TurboImage.  We are hoping customers will not migrate
off of TurboImage, but people should at least have the choice.
Security: although it is almost too restrictive for our tastes,  the Java
Sandbox with the "Trust no one" approach does make sense in many
environments.
Maintainability and robustness: Java is a simplified language which many
people are calling "C plus plus minus minus".  Sun feels that Java
applications are less likely to incur bugs since a lot of the C++ error
prone items like pointers have been removed.   And Java is truly object
oriented which will help the development process once developers get
clued into the power of object oriented programming.
Some of the concerns reviewed at the conference were with performance,
over-restrictive security, and with lack of features in some of the
toolkits like the java.awt (abstract windowing tools).   With Java 1.1
which is shipping the performance on Windows has been improved as it was
re-written with Win32 instead of MFC.   Coming later this year is the new
JFC (Java Foundation Classes).  And a new, improved security model will
allow certain "signed" Java applets and applications more system access
and facilitate Internet Commerce.
In Summary:

DISC has had some interesting development challenges the past 18 months
with the earlier Java tools but we are now feeling that the tools are
nearing production grade and are beginning to re-write some of our core
utilities using Java with our Java to OmniAccess to TurboImage technology

 ------------------------------
Rich Trapp
OMNIDEX Product Manager - IMAGE/SQL
Dynamic Information Systems Corporation  http://www.disc.com
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Voice: 303-444-4000  Fax: 303-444-0208