The product, which has won considerable support among corporate developers, could help HAHT stake its claim on a nascent market for an integrated technology that helps develop, deploy and maintain scaleable, open and secure Web applications.

Some of the new features in HAHT 2.0 include frame-based pages, which can now be created quickly and visually without the tedium of HTML. Also, developers can create, name, save, and reuse compound objects (any combination of objects such as HTML text, images, multimedia, or widgets that can be grouped on a Web page) by simply highlighting a section of a Web page and dragging it directly into the HAHTSITE project window. Other enhancements include interactive and remote debugging, structural site view and client-site form events for either Javascript or Visual Basic script.

Robert Wenig, director of advanced technology at SAP, a large client/server developer, said HAHT's integrated approach could significantly boost the productivity of his development work. ``With HAHT, we are able to use it to talk to our own object and easily build applications. It will save our customers days, weeks and even months. To build your dynamic front ends, it now takes you minutes.''

Available in the fourth quarter, the HAHTSITE 2.0 package includes the $995 Integrated Development Environment, the $695 software development kit and an application server that is priced at $2,495 per CPU.

Jim Hebert, president of HAHT, said his goal is to ``add significant value to organizations that try to extend their infrastructure to the Web.'' Since the release of HAHTSITE in July, the company has shipped a few hundred copies to corporate accounts, said Randy Drawas, its vice president of marketing.

HAHT is not alone in fighting for the hearts and minds of Web developers in the corporate arena. Bill Lyons, president of ParcPlace-Digitalk, said its SmallTalk product has also won support among corporations such as Bell Atlantic, Federal Express and Price Waterhouse trying to build Web applications.

``Our tools are mature and we have rich class library and we support multiple languages. These customers are using our product to build Internet solutions,'' Lyons said.

Sun discloses specs of Java chip Sun Microsystems Inc. unveiled details of its first processor designed solely to run forthcoming Java-based hardware devices.

Although Sun publicly described its picoJava processor last week, the actual silicon (which will be followed by systems based on the chips) is not expected to hit volume production until late 1997, said Sun officials in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The picoJava RISC processor is based in part on a superset of SunSoft Inc.'s object-oriented Java Virtual Machine. The combination of Java software paired with Java-optimized silicon could result in applications up to three times smaller in code size and as much as 20 times faster than X86, Sun officials claim.

Sun has given system designers flexibility to reduce manufacturing costs by enabling the chip to be configured with or without a floating point unit and 16K bytes of cache.

LG Semiconductor Ltd., Mitsubishi Electronics Inc., NEC Corp. and Samsung Semiconductor Ltd. have agreed to build picoJava processors along with Sun.

The processors, geared toward smart phones, network computers, personal digital assistants and set-top boxes, will be priced at about $25. (PC Week Online)

VDOnet ships VDOPhone for Internet VDOnet Corp. is expected to introduce today the commercial availability of the VDOPhone, a software package that enables full-color motion video telephone conversations over either the Internet or regular telephone lines. The company said VDOPhone is the industry's first commercial software that is fully compliant with both H.324 and Microsoft's NetMeeting architecture. It also plans to add H.323 compliance by early 1997, which will allow interoperability of the VDOPhone with any other standard-compliant, networked videoconferencing product.

The Internet version of VDOPhone is priced at $99. Adding H.324 version of the phone for use over regular phone lines brings the price to $149.

Briefs IBM said it has recruited more than 150 companies under its four-month-old Web affiliate program, which is designed to tap into the design and programming skills of the Web community. Many of these IBM Web affiliates will be working with the IBM marketing team and its business partners to penetrate the corporate accounts that are trying to establish a big presence on the Internet.

Bulletproof is expected to release JDesigner Pro version 1.2 this month. The product is designed to help developers create Java applications that can be deployed instantly over the Internet. The company said since its release in August, it has distributed more than 100 copies of JDesigner Pro, which competes with tools such as Jamba from Aimtech.

White Pine Software, developer of videoconferencing systems for the Internet, went public last week issuing three million shares at $9 each. The Company's Enhanced CU-SeeMe and the White Pine reflector, create a client-server solution that allows users to participate in real-time, multipoint videoconferences over the Internet and Intranets.

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