Castanet proxies will make the system work efficiently across corporate firewalls. Channels Channels are a cross between Java applets and conventional applications. Channels run in their own windows, not in a Web page. Channels are stored on your hard disk where they are available when the network isn't. Channels can read and write into one designated directory of your hard disk, preserving channel documents and preferences without threatening files that don't belong to them.
Channels can return user-provided data to developers, such as counts of feature usage and errors.
Because channels can be updated automatically and efficiently, they can be much more dynamic than traditional applications, which are updated once a year or so. Channels are an excellent vehicle for distributing information that changes weekly, daily, hourly, or even more often. Education channels that receive a new lesson every day, news channels that update sports scores every 15 minutes, and story channels whose casts and locales grow with time, are some examples. You subscribe to channels with the Castanet tuner. Subscribing downloads the channel, installs it on your hard disk, and launches it.