Sun also hints at Java WorkShop licensing deal with a major competitor -- all at the Sun User Group West conference
San Francisco (March 10, 1997) — Though last week’s SUG West (Sun User Group) conference failed to attract as many attendees as anticipated, the show did have much to offer Java enthusiasts, including some new and cool products, details on JavaNFS, and a sneak peak at Sun’s new Rapid Application Development (RAD) Java devlopment environment. If you couldn’t make the show, here are a few of the highlights.
Sun readying JavaNFS
Sun now says it plans to have its NFS remote file access protocol in the upcoming version 1.2 of the Java Developer Kit (JDK) — a technology SunSoft staff engineer Brent Callaghan called “JavaNFS.” NFS for Java is a logical play, since Sun’s new JavaStations are predicated on the idea of remote file access. Callaghan added that Sun sees JDK licensing “as a vehicle for rapid deployment of NFS technology.” Indeed, NFS support within Java’s File class, combined with Netscape’s recent decision to support WebNFS (the Internet-enabled version of NFS) in its client software (see
SunWorld
‘s
), stands to make the protocol ubiquitous.
Callaghan said that WebNFS will evolve into NFS V.4, which should begin to make its way through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization process this year. NFS V.4 will include such features as security negotiation, Unicode support, integrated file locking, and improved cross-platform support. (See Rawn Shah’s Connectivity column in SunWorld‘s August 1996 issue, which focused on WebNFS.)
Sun lets visual Java technology out of Studio
Hidden at the very back of the SUG West show floor was a demo version of Sun’s Java Rapid Application Development (RAD) product, code-named Project Studio. The demo, apparently copied directly from a Sun engineer’s desktop, featured a number of JavaBeans components, including a data feed, a splitter, a 2-D and 3-D grapher, and a 3-D delta grapher. Applications are created with Studio by dragging and dropping components onto a palette and connecting them together like a flow chart. The demo could switch seamlessly between development environment and the actual application.
Because the recently-released JDK 1.1 was the first to support JavaBeans, currently there are few components available for Studio. But Larry Weber, SunSoft’s VP of developer products, said his group will “be aggressively recruiting third-party developers to create Beans components.” Applications created with Studio could be JavaBeans components themselves, added Weber.
Studio will get its official product launch in the “near future,” according to Weber, meaning within a month or two. The product is expected to ship sometime this summer with what Weber calls “a rich starter set” of JavaBeans components, including some third-party software. Database access, standard GUI and calculation engines, chat, whiteboard, audio, video, charting, graphing, and spreadsheet components are planned.
During his SUG West keynote, Weber hinted that “one of Sun’s classical competitors will be announcing they have licensed Java WorkShop.” Indeed, Hewlett-Packard just announced (at Internet World, March 11-14, in Los Angeles) it is licensing SunSoft’s Java WorkShop (see “HP to offer its own edition of Sun’s Java WorkShop” in this month’s News and New Products Briefs).
The HP edition of Java WorkShop will allow the development and deployment of Java-based business applications on HP 9000 Enterprise workstations and servers and HP’s Windows NT-based systems. HP already offers the Java virtual machine and JDK and is currently enhancing both for the HP-UX operating system. The HP edition of Java WorkShop will sell for 9 per user license and is expected to ship in the second quarter this year.
The SUG East conference will be held in Boston on June 3 and 4, 1997. Look for more information at https://www.sug.org.
