Microsoft: a way to mainstream OLE - Blackbird application development software - includes related article on application development software - Product Information

Microsoft's vision of online authoring, as manifest through its development system code-named Blackbird, is the most ambitious of the vendors covered in this issue (Netscape is the runner-up). This is not because Blackbird is a more grandiose or encompassing application suite, but rather because Microsoft's approach is more integrative. Although the vision is based on much technology that is proprietary to Microsoft, it fits well with where we believe the electronic infrastructure is headed (see Choose Your Topology in Release 1.0, 6-95).

Blackbird is Microsoft's attempt to create a system that works well with the public Web, yet also offers proprietary advantages and even private labeling for companies that want to create their own complete service offerings. Beyond that, Microsoft sees Blackbird as an opportunity to merge many disparate development systems, from voice processing to client/server application development, all around OLE. OLE deconstructs applications into custom controls and other software objects; Blackbird helps deploy those applets across the Microsoft Network (MSN), and soon the Internet.

In fact, Blackbird is a way to mainstream OLE and potentially get the rest of the (non-microsoft) world using it. This will take considerable time, if it happens at all. Whether Microsoft's tools and design concepts are up to the challenge is an open question, and this strategy puts Microsoft's developers in a situation that has all the complexity of its own systems as well as the global Internet.

Bill be nimble, Bill be quick...

Microsoft's challenge is to make MSN flourish soon, so that it won't be eclipsed by more open systems, making Blackbird irrelevant, or at least obsolescent. The situation is similar to AT&T's with Interchange, which is also a proprietary network with more layout flexibility than the Web offers today. AT&T and Microsoft must deliver great development tools in order to maintain their advantage.

In fact, because it owns the operating system that Blackbird is optimized for, Microsoft alone must continue to improve the underlying architectures and protocols, many of which date back to the earliest versions of DOS. The Web is rapidly getting more interesting and powerful, in large part because thousands of companies and individuals are collectively improving it, a process which has its own drawbacks.

Because of the market-access advantages that almost brought about a Department of Justice intervention, MSN is likely to do well anyway as a private service. The question at hand is whether Microsoft's networked-application architecture makes it beyond MSN's walls and becomes more commonly used. The innovations Netscape is introducing, described above, make this a difficult task. This is where the battle between proprietary operating systems and the Internet is being fought.

What it offers

Blackbird isn't a monolithic content-creation environment. Instead, it is a platform within which other Ole-compliant Windows applications can become content-creation tools and even distributed applications. Microsoft wants Blackbird to be an inviting environment for third-party tools. The pace of technological change will help. Connectivity will change all standalone applications, making many obsolete. With Blackbird, Microsoft is attempting to offer traditional Windows applications a viable path to re-create and re-validate themselves in the networked world. It so happens that this path tends to make the applications dissolve into the Win95/Office framework.

According to Rich Barth, the group product manager of MSN tools, today developers have to write to the limitations of Web browsers. In Blackbird, developers don't see a browser, they see an empty window in a Win95 environment and have control over everything that happens within it, including the menu bar. In that sense, Blackbird offers more design freedom than Netscape's innovations, the way Hypercard was more flexible than the inviolable Macintosh interface.

What it is

Blackbird is designed as a full-life-cycle interactive application development system. It has three components: an authoring system called the Blackbird Designer; the Blackbird Server, which runs on Windows NT; and the Blackbird Client, a runtime module that lets users access and run Blackbird applications. Designers create "titles" that contain "articles."

Blackbird titles have three components: form layouts and other design elements, OLE custom controls to render data and the data itself. Articles can be dynamic, defined at runtime (see "Blackbird and Visual Basic"). The whole system is extensible in much the way that developers today write applications for the

Windows platform. Think of it as a way to turn an online environment into a platform similar to Windows -- no surprise there. (As is true for MSN, Blackbird does not support Windows 3.1.)

Without OLE, integration requires joint coding with each candidate application, as Macromedia is doing to make Director a part of Netscape. In the Blackbird vision, any application that is a good OLE citizen is a candidate for integration online. Macromedia is working with MSN to make this happen, though it could do so without Microsoft's cooperation.

What's in the box

Blackbird Designer will include title-management features such as an outline control, which automatically generates tables of contents; link management; a project editor; and one-button publishing: When a developer has finished a site, pushing a button releases it into production. Blackbird has limited site-management features, though the tools are OLE Automation enabled, allowing other applications to run them. Distributed OLE will do much of the link management (see Next's WebObjects, below).

Microsoft will also ship a version of Word customized for Blackbird that includes templates and SGML converters. The stylesheet in Blackbird Word will map to logical tags in BML and generate the right output.5 Because Blackbird separates content from style and emphasizes dynamic execution, it may never have WYSIWYG editing. Developers won't go in and tweak text so it fits better around images, etc.

Blackbird allows designers to integrate other functions on MSN, such as chat, bulletin boards, file transfer and e-mail. Caligari has announced a 3D development environment for Blackbird that will support the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).

Blackbird is in early beta test now, with live use on MSN scheduled for this January. The early MSN content-development tools are reputedly hard to use, so Blackbird has a vacuum to fill. Initially, Blackbird will be able to develop materials only for MSN. In fact, in the first release, all content created with Blackbird will have to reside on MSN, in Microsoft's data center, and will be visible only to MSN subscribers.

The second release, which Microsoft expects to put into beta test in the first half of 1996 and offer commercially by the end of that year (let's assume it happens in early 1997), will offer Web authoring. At that point, the same tools will be able to create content for MSN and the Web. That's a long time from now in Internet years.

HTML, meet BML

Blackbird has its own representation format, the Blackbird Markup Language (BML), which is a variant of HTML enhanced to be OLE 2.0-aware. Microsoft published BML's specifications with its pre-beta release and will continue to do so.

OLE is the linchpin of Microsoft's strategy overall and particularly for Blackbird (see Release 1.0, 5-94). With it, online pages won't be limited to HTML, helper applications and Perl scripts. They will be able to contain any file, multiple windows, sidebars -- anything that developers can do with OLE. For example, OLE custom controls might render data and make it useful. They could display stock price data in Microsoft Graph, Excel or a custom applet, instead of in a static image file. If the person browsing didn't have the applet, she could download or purchase it then and there.

Microsoft wants to make OLE components equal partners on the Internet, alongside helper applications, Java applets and anything else that may catch on. Most components of OLE are available on other platforms such as the Mac OS, so in principle, Blackbird stuff will eventually be useful on non-Microsoft systems. But Microsoft is less likely to be successful across platforms than other players, whose systems were designed to work on multiple machines from the start.

Potential Catch-22?

A potential show-stopper for Microsoft in this scenario is network security, which has already drawn the curtain low over General Magic's Telescript (although General Magic's possessiveness with the environment helped hobble it, too) and has caused less concern with Java and Tcl. Telescript and Java were carefully designed with secure transportability in mind; Tcl has a safer version called Safe-Tcl (see Release 1.0, 2-94).

When it was born as the Direct Data Exchange (DDE) capability in the earliest versions of Windows, OLE was not designed with trustworthy distributed applications in mind. As it has matured toward OLE 2.0, it has increased in power dramatically and now offers options and extensibility so varied it is difficult to imagine how they can be reined in. Will distributed OLE objects be secure, or are they a better opportunity for virus coders? Perhaps Cairols distributed object capabilities will help (see Release 1.0, 2-92, 8-92 and 5-94).

RELATED ARTICLE: Blackbird and Visual Basic

Blackbird offers developers a progressive execution environment that is designed to run applications better over online services and the Internet. One could write identical applications in Visual Basic and Blackbird. The VB applications would have to download in their entirety, then run locally. The Blackbird modules would execute dynamically. Also, VB is a programming environment. Blackbird doesn't require programming (though it will have a software developer's kit); it's a tool for professional designers. In Blackbird, developers drag and drop design elements. They can choose custom controls, then modify their property sheets. In a VB environment, they would choose objects, then code them to interact.

Blackbird will have a scripting language, probably C++ in the initial release. Over time, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) will be the scripting language for Blackbird. VBA is a script-compatible version of Visual Basic that currently drives Microsoft's Office applications.

Much of what other Web developers hope to achieve with Sun's Java language, Microsoft hopes that its developers will do with Visual Basic, OLE and the Windows architecture. Also, someone will likely write an OLE control to interpret Java, which would bring Java closer to the OLE envirorment.

(5) Blackbird Word is more similar to Word Internet Assistant than to SoftQuad's SGML Author for Microsoft Word (see Release 1.0, 9-94). Eventually, the Microsoft team plans to merge Internet Assistant and Blackbird Word, allowing people to create titles (or pages) for either system.

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