Sun VP delivers conference keynote on Java and critiques Microsoft's efforts with the language
The father of Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Java today praised Microsoft Corp.’s Java-based development efforts and downplayed the hype surrounding the popular programming language.
The comments in the Comdex Asia keynote address by James Gosling, vice president of Sun subsidiary Sunsoft Inc., were a departure from those made by Sun officials over the past year that played up Java as a means for breaking Microsoft’s dominance of the software industry.
“A lot of people said Java was going to save the world from Bill Gates … but the folks in Redmond have adopted Java and are doing a really good job with it,” said Gosling. Redmond, Washington, is the home of Microsoft.
Those who have pegged Java as a Microsoft killer include John Gage, director of Sun’s science office, who last year at this event promoted Java as a means for small software developers to “make a spreadsheet better than [Microsoft’s] Excel.”
Gage made his comments amid a year-long marketing blitz by Sun to gain industry support for Java and to build a universe of development tools for the language. “It’s been an extremely wild time,” said Gosling. “I feel in my bones that I aged seven years in the last year.”
Continuing to turn down the rhetorical heat, Gosling after his keynote said that the company must live up to the expectations set in the year and a half since Java’s launch. “The biggest challenge for Java over the next year is delivering on all of the promises we made,” in particular application programming interfaces that enable independent software developers to write advanced Java applications for fields such as electronic commerce, he said.
Local software developers in attendance said that the keynote gave them a good overview of the language, which they’re not yet using. “We want to know how good is Java,” said Budiman Paidjo, of P.T. Royalcomindo Hitech, which develops software for the banking industry. “The government is pushing very hard to get everyone on the Internet, and Java is one of the pieces,” said a developer at a local government agency who asked not to be identified.
While he spoke admiringly of Microsoft’s Java development efforts, Gosling cut down the company’s ActiveX development architecture for component-based applications as a competitor to Java.
Though ActiveX allows a developer to use many languages to write applications, those applications will run only on the Windows platform, unlike Java, which is platform independent, Gosling said.
