Though Netscape's current version of Communicator and Netcaster falls far short of their original "Constellation" vision from a year ago, the company is once again extolling the virtues of their upcoming Webtop technology, code-named "Gemini." According to the plan, Gemini will provide users with easy access to "Web data" and will give developers a way to marry legacy data with HTML.
Netscape intends to demonstrate Gemini in two weeks, along with alpha versions of their next servers (code-named "Apollo") and Communicator suite (code-named "Mercury"). Sun is collaborating with Netscape on the Gemini HTML engine, which will be based on JavaBean components. Netscape expects this technology to offer similar capabilities to Microsoft's integrated IE 3.0 ActiveX control, which lets developers embed a full Web browser in any application. The benefit, of course, to the Gemini approach, is that it would work on any platform, not just Windows
