Novera Inc, the mysterious Burlington, Massachusetts-based start-up that struck its first deal with Corel Corp last week (CI No 3,025) moves into the full light of day on Tuesday when Sun Microsystems trots out its Network Computer in New York. According to our associate paper Online Reporter, the year-old company will show off in public its operating system-like networking layer, dubbed EPIC and short for Enterprise Computing Platform for Internet Computing at the Sun event. On the JavaStation, EPIC will sit above the Java virtual machine, JavaOS and HotJava browser – it is completely written in Java itself – and will provide the application management, application services, object and relational database access and user-defined services needed to deploy large-scale business-critical applications across the Internet, says Novera. It needs no interface definition language, JavaScript or CGI. Its architecture, which makes heavy use of Java Sockets, is said to be such that it could supersede Corba, the Object Management Group’s object technology dearly beloved of the Unix set and rival to Microsoft’s ActiveX. EPIC will handle Java and by extension ActiveX objects anywhere on a network, transporting them with interface and inher itance support. Essentially it’s the glue that holds together and orchestrates all these free-floating applets we’re promised. Its specific capabilities include platform-independent file and print services, TCP/IP, the LDAP lightweight directory access protocol and LDAP authorization, multitasking, centralized administration, management control, metering and broadcast. It is said to be optimized to 28.8Kbps lines, supports multimedia, audio and video and mobile users. EPIC is currently in beta 2 at 10-15 sites and should ship right after it’s announced November 18th.
