SCO Tuning for Services, Ports Tarantella

According to a story on Sm@rt reseller, SCO is tuning now to be a service company (not just to Linux but to AIX and other unices), and they are porting (this is unofficial and not confirmed) Tarantella to Linux. Can anyone post details about Tarantella? What is it? How is it compared to Citrix's Metaframe?

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Tarantella info

[substrate]

Click here

Death to marketroids

[ABadDog]

This is from their faq

What is Tarantella Enterprise II?


Tarantella Enterprise II is the flagship Tarantella product providing enterprise class features for customers demanding an extensible, scaleable solution. Tarantella Enterprise II servers can be configured as a centrally managed array, supporting thousands of users. They can also connect to hundreds of application servers providing the reliablility, availability and scaleability needed for enterprises.


What is Tarantella software? Is it middleware?

In a way it is middleware, but that term does not truly describe the full capabilities of the Tarantella product ("Tarantella"). Tarantella is middleware in that it sits between your appliation servers and client devices. But unlike most traditional middleware, Tarantella allows you to deploy existing server based applications, as well as new ones, over the network, via a web interface, without the need to rewrite anything.

Well, I'm glad we got that cleared up!

Ok, so it gets slightly more informative, but apparently the most important thing about the product is that it's fully buzzword compliant.

Tarantella vs. MetaFrame

[diabloii]

They are both using different technology for their implementation. SCO's is Java based and therefore more portable. That's why it is available for so many platforms such as OpenServer 5.x, UnixWare 2.x and 7.x, Solaris, AIX, Tru64, HP-UX, and soon Linux. It allows for any application server to serve applications to any client through a Java capable browser. MetaFrame is purely for serving Windows applications, but Tarantella allows you to run Mainframe apps, Linux apps, Unix apps, Windows Apps, etc... on any client. It provides a much better solution as an ASP than MetaFrame ever could. It's flexibility and robustness is not easily matched by any other solution.

I have seen a piece of the technology used for Tarantella in a tool provided in UnixWare 7.1.x called Webtop. It allows a administrator to adminstrate the system from any browser. It also allows clients to execute X applications in a browser. One of the coolest things I saw was a full X desktop in a browser. This can be done in any client. I know for windows you would need an X emulator, but this solution now does away with that for windows clients.

It is a very cool product that I see being a very good addition to the applications available for Linux. You can also look at it as another way to attack Microsoft dominance.