Habanero offers a red-hot solution
to real-time team collaboration

The folks who brought us Mosaic have released another application for the Internet — this one is in the form of a distributed collaboration environment named after the hottest chili pepper on earth. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has announced the availability of the Beta 1 release of NCSA Habanero, a Java-based solution to the problems of true synchronous network groupware. Beta Habanero — including bytecode and source code — can now be downloaded for free at:

https://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero.

“Habanero is a project to explore the power of distributed objects for enabling collaboration in a Javatized Net,” said Larry Smarr, founder and director of the NCSA. “It is written from the ground up in Java and forms the framework for other researchers to create specialized software tools.”

“With Habanero, you can take a tool, for whatever your field is, and very readily turn it into something that you and your colleagues can use to simultaneously examine, analyze, or evaluate the same information: a picture, graph, spreadsheet, whatever,” said Larry Jackson, technical manager for the NCSA Habanero Group.

According to the NCSA Habanero home page: “Included, or planned, are all the networking facilities, routing, arbitration, and synchronization mechanisms necessary to accomplish the sharing of state data and key events between collaborator’s copies of a software tool…. There is no inherent limit in the number of tools per session, nor is there a limit on the type of tools that may be shared. As the [Habanero] project progresses, additional capabilities will enable routing of Habanero session information to a very wide number of participants.”

Wrapped objects

Essential to Habanero is the use of wrapped objects — transmitting Java objects instead of formatted packets of data across a network. “We use this to transmit actions in the applications we’ve written to communicate with each other,” said Stephen Pietrowicz, a member of the Habanero technical team. “For example, when I type in a whiteboard, the action of hitting Return in the key in the input area is transmitted along with text in the input area to all of the applications across the session. A mouse-up action in the whiteboard is transmitted along with the object that was drawn to all of the other applications. And so on.”

“Wrapped objects offer three important advantages to distributed collaboration over the Internet,” said Jackson. “The first is in more closely matching the internals of the programs that are being shared — they can just send their own existing state representations, without building data tables and adding the protocol code for whatever specification applies. Simply, it’s easier to port a program to this framework than to write all the networking code yourself.

“Secondly, come the issues of session capture, suspense, replay, and edit. We can — soon — save the whole stream of the multimedia, multi-tool distributed conference, and can then replay or edit this electronic ‘transcript’ for absent colleagues, or to produce a derivative work. And as all the state and event data moves in this one framework, it’s easy to get ahold of it for integrated session archival.

“Third, it leverages Java’s Virtual Machine specification to mask system heterogeneities from developers. Java handles the ‘little-endian/big-endian’ problems in building data packets, as well as a host of other problems. Application developers won’t have to waste time on all that.”

The care and feeding of a pepper

The NCSA Habanero project has been underway for quite a while, taking more than five years of work on the part of full-time staff and students. Credit for the name Habanero goes to Jackson. Why he picked a pepper for his project’s label appears to be a question of degree rather than taste. Pietrowicz explained: “Peppers are measured [for their spiciness] in ‘scovilles.’ A jalapeno, for example, is about 5,000 scovilles. A habanero is an astounding 300,000 scovilles. It’s the hottest pepper there is. Some of the folks at Sun thought it was interesting that we went with the ‘hot’ part, as opposed to everyone else coming out with coffee-related words.”

Will Habanero blossom into more hit commercial products from the fertile soil of the NCSA?

“That could happen,” said Jackson. “There is the clear applicability of synchronous conferencing in the classic office applications: text editors, spreadsheets, et cetera. The NCSA is certainly not looking to attempt to compete with the fine commercial offerings in these areas. However, if some of these firms licensed Habanero, all the science, engineering, and education players we’re working with would significantly benefit.”

The main Habanero Web site is already hosting a number of Java applets as demonstration vehicles for its technology. Among the organizations currently demonstrating their concepts for shared multi-user experiences are the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, with an applet called the NPAC Visible Human Viewer; the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, with its Weather Visualizer; and Sun Microsystems’ JavaSoft, with applets called Cards Demo and Whiteboard Demo.

Be there now

A public server (http://havefun.ncsa.uiuc.edu at port 2000) will be dedicated to hosting an applet called Chat on a limited basis — Fridays from 1:00 to 3:00 PM CST. Upon clicking on “Join” (for those whose machines have an externally resolvable DNS name), the Chat window will enable developers to try out their Habanero installations while actually performing remote collaboration.

There are also discussion groups that can be joined by e-mailing to habanero-users-request@habanero.ncsa.uiuc.edu and habanero-developers-request@h abanero.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Just type “subscribe” in the subject line.

Great expectations?

Though Jackson said that the NCSA is not in any licensing discussions at this time, you can expect that to change soon. An e-mail address for licensing inquiries has already been set up at license@habanero.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Smarr, in a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, speculated that Habanero is about “six to eight months from a final ramp-up” and that the first applications employing its technology could appear shortly thereafter.

“We strongly want to encourage software-tool developers to explore the concept of adding a synchronous work mode,” Jackson said. “It’s never been possible or practical before, without a lot of networking hassles. So we suspect designers are in the habit of assuming it’s too hard. It’s not too hard anymore, especially for Java developers.”