BEA Visionary Bosworth Details Mobile Browser Concept

BEA Chief Architect Adam Bosworth demonstrated the technology, dubbed the Alchemy Universal Client Platform, during at keynote address Wednesday at BEA eWorld in San Francisco. With Alchemy, BEA aims to solve the problem of Web browser use on mobile devices, which currently is a cumbersome experience for users, he said.

"Browsing [on a mobile device] is very painful, and I do it only when I absolutely have to," Bosworth said. "Since a lot of us think [this is] a big problem, we thought we could see how we could help."

The concept of a user interface that can span the increasingly mobile nature of Web devices isn't new. Sybase has had success with its iAnywhere product suite, for which it has garnered broad ISV adoption. IBM and Microsoft, respectively, promise to improve rich mobile-client technology in future versions of the Lotus software suite and the Windows operating system.

In addition, Macromedia is working to deliver rich user interfaces on multiple, Web-enabled devices by eliminating traditional browsers and serving content through its Flash player, which can download and run applications on a local client. Under that model, the client makes server calls only when necessary to avoid diminishing the user experience.

Bosworth said BEA is taking a different approach with Alchemy, which will be based on open standards and eventually donated to the open-source community, rather than kept as a proprietary BEA product. Alchemy also will extend common development technology and not be tied to a particular development framework or underlying platform, he added.

During Bosworth's keynote, his son Alex demonstrated Alchemy and said he built an interface using Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage and other common Web development tools. "We wanted to figure out how can we extend the model you already knew, the one you already understood [and configured] to behave really well in a world where connectivity is unreliable," Adam Bosworth said.

Alchemy uses asynchronous messaging technology that enables the server to process information in the background without taking away a mobile user's productivity. For example, during the demo, Alex Bosworth retrieved account information from the Alchemy interface, but as he waited for the data to upload he was still able to do other tasks on the browser. In traditional browsers, users must wait for synchronous message calls to finish processing before performing other Web functions.

Alchemy also leverages intelligent caching, which readies Web-based information and applications for when a user is offline. In the keynote demo, information was readied for offline use in Alchemy and appeared the same as it did online--and there were no service interruptions, even when Alex Bosworth disconnected the Ethernet cable from his laptop.

BEA's Alchemy technology would create an interesting scenario for Microsoft, which dominates the browser market with Internet Explorer, and for ISVs. James Governor, principal analyst at technology think-tank Red Monk, said Alchemy proves that innovation in Web browser technology is anything but dead, particularly for mobile Web users. In fact, Microsoft's delays in delivering the next generation of Windows, code-named Longhorn, could be the impetus for current innovations in rich client technology, he said.

"The challenge to Microsoft is building faster than anyone has expected," Governor said. "The delays around Longhorn opened a window of opportunity for the Java and the open-source communities to deliver some of these Microsoft-equivalent technologies."

ISVs, too, will have some choices of rich client platforms. Though Sybase has built an ISV community around its software, the promise of rich mobile client technology from middleware vendors with more market share, such as IBM and BEA, could inspire some ISVs to switch allegiances, Governor said. And if BEA open-sources Alchemy--as the San Jose, Calif.-based company has promised--the implications for competing vendors could become more significant, he added.

Bosworth stressed in his keynote that Alchemy remains a concept, not a product. He said BEA plans to deliver the technology only with the help of partners such as Nokia and Intel, which could mean the technology won't be ready for a year or two.

Bosworth first discussed the Alchemy concept in an interview last December, when he outlined a project to deliver a wireless browser that would allow applications to be updated in the background, improving the performance of Web-based applications on wireless devices.