Hi folks... Developer News 11/04/97 NetStation (it never ends, does it?) ---------- A number of developers have made enquiries regarding how to persuade NCFresco to do useful things such as use proxy servers, fake Netscape identification when signing on to sites which expect Netscape extensions, etc. I have now obtained clearance for the release of a couple of documents which describe how to persuade NCFresco to jump through these useful hoops and more; NCFresco has been written in such a manner that configuration can either be done globally by building suitable environment variables into the NC startup sequence (eg in !RunEther,feb ; these variables are documented in http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/reference/nc/ncfrescoconfignotes.txt ) or in a per-user Config file (detailed in http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/reference/nc/ncfrescouserconfig.txt ). Having spent a fair chunk of last weekend persuading assorted apps to run on NetStations in preparation for the SME Networks Show, I'm now in a more realistic position to get some documentation down on how to go about persuading RISC OS apps to run. Notes will hopefully become available early next week. Smoke and Mirrors ----------------- A number of you have been in touch following the press release of April 8th detailing the forthcoming RISCafe and eXtend technology... "This is Rumour Control, here are the facts." Our Java implementation so far encompasses the Java VM, a Bytecode interpreter, a source-to-Bytecode compiler and an implementation of AWT. We are currently lacking JIT and JavaBeans, although these issues (particularly JIT) are likely to be addressed at a later date. Java is currently only available internally; although the technology is demonstrable (I have been demonstrating it earlier this week at the SME Networks Show) and it performs well on the validation suites it is not ready to be licensed or productised yet as it first needs to be fully verified and made ROMmable. Once Java is cleared for licensing release, I'll be sure to let you all know ASAP in a future missive. eXtend is an X11 server for NCOS; once releasable, it will give X11R6 compliance. Thus any xclient will be able to export its display to a NetStation, and the NetStation will be able to feed input back to it. eXtend is expected to support both xdm and xdmd servers. In common with Java, it is not available for licensing or as product currently; I'll keep you all up to date as things happen. Cheers, Dave