Review: Marimba

Marimba, the partnership of four of the original Java programmers, has created after eight months of effort a set of applications that attempt to transform the active content metaphor from browser based to something more akin to a TV tuner. At least that is the Hype^tm. What are these applications? Lets take an inventory:

The Tuner
The Transmitter
Bongo

How do these map to the browser metaphor? The tuner would be the browser, the transmitter the HTTPD server, and Bongo would be a tool to create canned web pages. The tuner and transmitter form a package Marimba calls Castanet. More accurately Castanet describes the system of channel distribution and replication that is at the core of this idea.

So, what does this have to do with Java? Well, in this initial release, Marimba supports only Java applets as channel media, in the future they expect to allow all types of channel media. Additionally, Java is the language that Marimba tools are written in and it is the language that Bongo uses to write its presentations.

At first I was under the impression that Bongo was a full-featured IDE like the other IDEs that I have reviewed on this page. It is not. It is simply an application that you may use to generate what Bongo calls "presentations". These presentations can have "scripting" (not actually scripting, really just Java code included with the presentation) and they can use Bongo components or standard components from the JDK AWT. Layout is strictly via absolute coordinates, this may lead to some amount of incompatibility across platforms. The Bongo environment is very limited, however, and I was not able to implement easily my example used in all the other IDE reviews. I was able to generate the interface but adding in the various client/server classes (without first converting them to Bongo widgets, outside Bongo) looked prohibitive.

I will say, however, that Bongo sports some impressive widgets. The floating window looked the most interesting of the examples followed closely by the tree widget. It shouldn't be long before a standard desktop environment can be implemented easily entirely in Java with duplication/replication services provided by Castanet or something very similar to it.

What use is this tool? Did you ever wonder how your laptop users were going to use your enterprise applets or how you could easily update everyone with the newest version or how you were going to save state from one session to the next? Castanet answers all these questions and appears to a fairly stable environment. Get it. Try it. You'll like it.

Sam Pullara
spullara@suba.com