Pachyderm: The Platform is the Web

• Much of the user interface executes directly on the client computer. We achieve this by implementing the UI in a Java applet. There are alternatives, such as implementing the UI with HTML forms (perhaps with JavaScript support), but it's pretty much impossible to construct a satisfactory UI that way: partly because of the limited primitives available, but more importantly because too many of the simple user interactions would require a round-trip transaction with the web server. Even if you have a high-bandwidth connection to the web server, the UI wouldn't work well with those latencies.

• There's no software to install. This also comes from our use of Java for the UI, but it's an important separate effect. It has two benefits. First, you can use any computer with an adequate web browser. Second, you will always have the most recent version of the software, which makes your life simpler as well as your system adminstrator's.

• The client code is entirely platform independent. This is a consequence of writing it in Java and HTML (plus careful debugging). Increasingly many of the computers on the Internet are PC's running Windows 95 or NT, but by no means all of them. The structure we have used means that you can also access your email from a Digital Unix or Sun workstation, or from a Macintosh, or from a "Network Computer".

• We have a separate project, the Secure Web Tunnel, which allows a client web browser outside of a corporate firewall to make a secure, authenticated, web request to any web server inside the firewall. The web tunnel uses SSL encryption, and suppports authentication via X.500 certificates or CryptoKeys, so the transactions are quite secure. On the other hand, to the receiving web server the request looks like any ordinary request, with no special treatment required. This maintains the notion that you can use any computer to read your email, even if you're currently outside the firewall.