Push technology pioneer Marimba Inc saved a clutch of licensee announcements up for one big push at the Web Design & Development ’97 conference in San Francisco last week. There was also one new product amid all the back-slapping. PublishNow, Marimba’s software development kit, will be launched in the spring to enable software developers to embed Castanet function into their products. The San Francisco-based company has won over a number of tools vendors, including Symantec Corp, Borland International Inc, Macromedia Inc, Random Noise Inc and FutureTense Inc. The developers kit will enable these companies and others to embed Castanet functions into their products, so that developers can use their usual development tool to write applications, and then publish them as Castanet channels. Marimba has its own tool to do this, Bongo, but obviously realizes users are not going to throw their existing tools away that easily. Tools vendors are also being offered a version of the Transmitter software, called TX5, and a tuner that is designed for testing applications, although the version only permits five tuners to log on within one hour. On the database front, Oracle Corp is said to be linking its Universal Server database with Castanet, so that an Oracle database could trigger Castanet channels on the fly, removing the need for a middle layer. Content providers including, CNN, Columbia Tristar Interactive, Public Broadcast Service, Yahoo! and ZDNet have signed to use Castanet technology to deliver and update their content. Marimba has also linked with its good friend Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co.
