The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the Web Computer Graphics Metafile profile (WebCGM) as a full recommendation. Based on the widely used aerospace profile (ATA), WebCGM is the product of a collaboration between the W3C and the CGM Open Consortium, which includes Boeing, NIST and Xerox. It describes a way of exchanging dynamic, hyperlinked CGM files – think engineering blueprints and annotated CAD/CAM documents – over the web. The W3C has also released a stable, open source version of its Jigsaw Java web server. Jigsaw 2.0 is intended as an architecture for use in evaluating new web protocols. The W3C has been using Jigsaw to assess the merits of HTTP 1.1, distributed publishing, PICS, RDF, HTTP extensions and shared web caches via IP multicast. Jigsaw is also built to offer faster web access through HTTP 1.1 support, plus an open source implementation of the Java servlet interface. As chief architect Yves Lafon put it: Jigsaw allows anybody to try out ideas on how to make the web faster. Jigsaw takes advantage of Java’s portability across platforms, and should run on most operating systems out of the box. It has been tested on Windows 95 and NT and Solaris 2.x. There are reports of successful installations on OS/2, MacOS, BeOS and AIX. (Strangely enough, no one seems to have run it on Linux yet.) On the downside, the biggest problem with Java is its performance. In an interpreted implementation, Java has an extra layer of programming between it and the hardware, in the shape of the virtual machine. This makes it hard for such Java applications to match the speed of native binaries. However Jigsaw uses what the W3C calls smart caching mechanisms to equal or exceed the speed of its non-Java rivals. Besides, web serving is a good application for Java in general. It’s not particularly computation-intensive, and computation is where Java’s performance hits hardest.
