Top 25 Technology Drivers

For the past three years, Rafael Bracho has been trying to stuff the complexity back into distributed computing and network computing. "An important realization is to make it easy to add policy to distributed computing," he says. Looking at the morass of systems in most large corporations, Bracho's dream seems almost unattainable, but this former artificial- intelligence researcher has a desire to accomplish and a drive for speed. Although Bracho enthusiasti cally describes the scant seconds his Toyota MR2 Turbo or his Ninja takes to go from 0 to 60, he says, "building a company is the most exciting and scariest thing I've done."

ActiveWeb is a communications infrastructure, middleware and Java development tool. Its main components are the information broker and adapters. The information broker acts as a hub, exchanging information among the dissimilar resources, such as databases and financial applications and Web browsers; it also routes messages and guarantees their delivery over the Internet. Adapters map the information from the database or other corporate data to the information broker, so users can publish information from the database to clients who subscribe to the information. Java development components map the adapter to a specific application. Nearly all of ActiveWeb was written in Java, and indeed, Active Software developed Visual Java, a Visual Basic equivalent for Java, and licensed it to SunSoft for sale in its JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) product.

For the next year , Bracho will focus on executing, as his team focuses on bringing version 1.0 of ActiveWeb out of beta and into market. He is working on the next version of ActiveWeb, which is slated for delivery early next year. That version will scale to multiple information brokers, thus enabling ActiveWeb to be used in large corporate enterprises. Bracho knows the difficulty of the task that lies ahead of him--a distributed database environment with no central point of intelligence or control that will enable the information brokers to exchange information with each other and with their "clients." He believes he can create ActiveWeb to scale not only in terms of geography, but also time. Because the events are extensible, his goal is for MIS organizations not to have to replace a version of an application to make a current o r future ActiveWeb-based application function.

Bracho speaks of systems in biological terms, drawing on his research in robotics vision. The commonality between events in Internet-based distributed computing and biological beings is asynchroncity; and the incredible complexity inside that is hidden by a simple interface. With his affinity to see computing in more natural terms, perhaps he can stuff the complexity back inside the systems.

Contribution Last 12 Months: Building complexity inside of distributed computing and making it easy to use.
Millennium Forecast: The availability of high-speed connections. We will be able to communicate large amounts of data at low cost. As the bandwidth goes up, it will change the way we think.
Millennium Disturbance: It's hard to determine the impact of the Microsoft-Netscape war. It would be very disturbing if the Wintel platform continued to hold the grip it has now. Monopolies slow innovation.
Car: 1991 Toyota MR2 Turbo, without the fog lights , purchased the week after it was announced in May 1990, and a 1995 Ninja motorcycle.