If you're looking for Xenocode, it's morphed. Now it's a warmer, friendly, consumer-y Spoon.

And Spoon has launched a Spoon Server that's supposed deliver Windows desktop apps instantly over the web without installs, long downloads or dependencies such as .NET Framework, Adobe Air and Java. It supports 32- and 64-bit apps and launches after buffering 5%-10% of the virtual machine payload.

It's Spoon's streaming technology and app virtualization - a new Spoon Studio version of the old Xenocode Virtual Studio - that does it.

The company says it's five to 20 times faster than traditional download and setup. It works inside browsers via a small plug-in. It's supposed to turn desktop apps into software-as-a-service (SaaS) or ad-based offerings.

Software publishers and ISVs can use Spoon Server to launch evaluation versions directly from their web sites without installations or downloads. Autodesk Labs is using it so users can play with its Inventor Fusion technology preview.

Naturally Spoon is using the widgetry itself to demo its stuff at Spoon.net, an online library of pre-streamed applications that should become a revenue generator once Spoon gets a billing system.

Novell is licensing Spoon technology to power its Zenworks App Virtualization. Other licensing arrangements are said to be in the works.

The widgetry involves no administrative privileges, device drivers, code changes or special infrastructure. It's supposed to stream efficiently over both the web and wide area networks, and be 100 times more scalable than remote desktop-based delivery. A single server can support more than 10,000 users. That makes it a natural for games.

It's supposed to dramatically reduce maintenance and support costs and enable legacy apps to run unmodified on Windows 7. As you might expect, companies can use Spoon to make desktop apps available to users wherever they are via the web, SharePoint or directly from the Start menu, even, Spoon says, on locked-down desktops.

Spoon Server involves an integrated app portal, web-based administration, detailed analytics on app usage and user behavior, support for embedding apps on external portals such as SharePoint via a JavaScript interface, and APIs to integrate Spoon streams into existing provisioning systems and web sites. Apps can optionally be migrated to the desktop for offline execution.

Spoon CEO and founder Kenji Obata says, "By combining app virtualization with radically new predictive streaming and modular decomposition techniques, Spoon Server enables a zero-install experience over standard HTTP while improving operational economics by a factor of more than 100 as compared to remote desktop-based architectures."

Spoon Server is offered in an $80 per-seat license model for enterprises and an $8,000-to-start per-app license model for software publishers. Education can figure five bucks a seat. A free evaluation of Spoon Server is available at http://spoon.net/Server.

The company anticipates moving on to additional platforms