OVERVIEW

It is no secret that Web development tools are getting more sophisticated and more diverse in their second and third releases. In addition, there has been phenomenal growth in the intranet area. The application development environments, editing and publishing utilities, management tools, as well as other instruments of programming are being utilized to both plan and assemble intranets.

There is no longer a conglomerate of favorites from previous projects. The intranet developers have several good Web-specific options to sort through, a job that often is very challenging.

The benefit is that users do not need to re-master everything they know. Most application development products will work with programmers' favorite tools as well as with the Web-oriented products.

Both authoring and development tools can now link client/server and Web technologies. Most of these tools are also being updated to help move existing applications to an intranet.

One of these new components assist developer efforts in porting e-mail systems to the Web by encrypting messages and code that is sent across the World Wide Web. These e-mail extensions also handle authentication through digital signatures. In addition, developers can create Web applications by generating HTML code objects.

Development is also leading to an application state server component, which records all transactions to make certain they are completed. The goal is also to add Java and ActiveX support as an object component.

Furthermore, Web development tools are driving into the next generation from several vendors. New tools now include programmer's utilities and feature...