A loose collection of Java enthusiasts from around the world have seized upon Netscape's recent release of Communicator 5 source code, and are busily hacking away on Jazilla -- a Java-based version of the browser.
The news comes just weeks after Netscape and Sun Microsystems acknowledged that they were seeking partners to take over "Javagator," a proposed 100-percent-pure Java version of Netscape's browser. Now, eager developers have taken matters into their own hands and are porting the Netscape C++ code, called Mozilla, to Java.
"I feel that having the free-source atmosphere around Jazilla will mean that a Java Navigator will be possible, as we will be free from many of the constraints that could have killed off Netscape's effort," said Al Sutton, a computer security consultant and Java developer based in England.
Jazilla might prove the first opportunity that consumers will have to get their hands on a truly useful, widely available Java application, according to one developer. Its popularity or usefulness, however, is an open question.
Sutton, who spearheaded the Jazilla effort with a call to action on the mozilla.general news group, said in an email that development of Javagator had stalled under "commercial pressures of budgets and time scales."
The Jazilla project is still in its early stages, as the eight or so developers organize and assess what freely available Java code could be used in the effort.
"We are looking at what Java technologies are available, what existing class libraries, such as Java Mail, Java Networking, database connectivity, and Java directory," said Joshua Rodd, a 16-year-old Java and OS/2 developer.
Rodd said that members of the Jazilla team had been in email contact with programmers at Netscape working on the Javagator project. He hinted that the initiative was dead.
"The Javagator project didn't go very well, so this is a reincarnation of that -- we've had email back and forth with the people who worked on it, and they explained all of their challenges," said Rodd.
"The reason [Javagator] failed was organizational -- it wasn't a priority," said Rodd.
However, a Netscape official said the Javagator project was still on. "We're still in ongoing discussions with our partners and are still committed to doing it with partner participation," said Netscape's Maggie Young.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for IBM's Java team said that for its part, Big Blue welcomed the Jazilla project.
"It's pretty neat," said Jason Woodward, of IBM's Java technical marketing group. "It's a real sign that there is serious momentum in the Java community around building a browser in Java."
Woodward said that the project was in part good news for IBM because it would extend the reach of the browser onto pure Java platforms like the company's network computers. He added that the biggest task ahead of the team would likely be the HTML rendering engine, which interprets HTML to format Web pages.
But Rodd said that Netscape had already provided the code for the rendering engine as a part of the Mozilla source, and that it only needed to be ported to Java.
"My prediction is that within a month we will have people starting to code real modules, maybe in two months there will be something that works for developers, and maybe in three months there will be an alpha," said Rodd.
Lew Tucker, JavaSoft's director of developer relations, was predictably pleased with the effort, but said that it would likely have little impact on the Javagator project.
"It is a great thing that they are doing it," said Tucker. "It seems like it might be a good thing for the industry to get a Java version of the browser."
The Jazilla team is only one of a number of grassroots coders who have banded together to port Mozilla to a variety of platforms. At last count, Mozilla was running on both Unix and Windows computers, and others are working to have it run on OS/2, Apple Macintosh, BeOS -- even the Amiga platform.
The past few days have seen a flurry of Mozilla hacks, patches and mods. One programmer released a patch to disable the notorious blink tag, while another intrepid hacker created a version of Mozilla as an 46 Kb ActiveX control.
"The Internet was [once] a place to freely distribute ideas and code to people around the world," said Shane Trahan, another developer on the Jazilla team.
"It is great to see that in some corners of the Web, people are returning to the grassroots [reasons] of why the Internet was created in the first place," Trahan said.
