This week at the Java Business Conference in New York, Sun Microsystems will take another critical step in attempting to increase the acceptance of Java.
Sun's ultimate success or failure with the development language could determine the fate of hordes of solutions providers and developers that have bet the bank on Java .The good news for Sun (Nasdaq:SUNW) and many developers is that Java is finally moving beyond the early-adopter stage. One prime example: Ericsson Inc. will discuss how it is building Java-based telecom networks during this week's show. Moreover, major players like IBM Corp., Inprise Corp. and Symantec Corp. now offer solid Java development tools. But with Java's success, Sun is becoming increasingly hard-pressed to keep control of its offering.
Granted, as the sole proprietor of the language -- despite constant pressure to open up the code -- Sun remains in the driver's seat. That fact alone doesn't sit well with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT). Nor does it sit well with some other established players, which increasingly are making end runs around Sun and making the vendor's ride extremely bumpy, especially now that Java finally is paying off.
Java has hit the big time, and no one has written that story," says Michael Pridemore, CEO of Socketware, which was founded in 1997 and just launched a partner program for its first product, an enterprise-level e-mail marketing program called Accucast. "Companies including ours are shipping big Java applications. There is no way we could have done what we did without Java."
Sun claims over 1.7 million downloads of Java 2 since last December, and 4.5 million downloads of its predecessor, the Java Developers Kit 1.1. Sun VP Jon Kannegaard, who until Thursday headed Sun's Java software division and had guided Sun's strategy since Java was launched in mid-1995, says the development language's biggest problem is success.
Recently, Kannegaard says, he was asked to fix a situation between two Sun partners arguing over which was first to market with the best Enterprise Edition product. "They were hot on shipping before we had J2EE compliance, so they were not officially able to say it," Kannegaard says. "Java is big business now and not just PR, so you have concerns about not being disadvantaged in a real market."
Everybody, hold on Kannegaard, who entertained Sun employees on Halloween by dressing as the Sun Community Source License, likens Sun's stewardship of Java to a car "that has two wheels on the ground and two wheels off and is always about to tip over." Industry momentum, Kannegaard says, "has created an uncomfortable dance where we all have our arms linked with our competitors."
But driving Java into the big time also means running one step faster than Microsoft and its army of third-party developers, and Sun has been on a treadmill to fulfill its original stated goals. While it continues to deliver on some promises, it has yet to make "write once, run anywhere" a reality.
Sun will attempt to answer many of its critics at this week's Java Business Conference in New York. During the show, Sun will launch Java 2 Enterprise Edition, a platform for writing enterprise e-commerce applications that can run across multiple tiers of servers and thin clients.
J2EE is a direct competitor to Windows DNA (Distributed interNet Applications Architecture) 2000, which is optimized to work Microsoft's upcoming Windows 2000 and the next generation of BackOffice applications. Sun, meanwhile, will follow J2EE early next year with Java 2 Standard Edition for developing desktop applications and Java 2 Micro Edition for developing apps on sub-PC devices.
Counterattack Microsoft officials declined to be interviewed for this story, but they continue to work relentlessly behind the scenes to keep Windows -- rather than Java and the Internet -- at the center of the programming universe.
At press time, Sun was hoping that U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Whyte would reinstate a preliminary injunction requiring Microsoft products to comply with Sun's Java. Although Microsoft did not get the injunction overturned, it did get the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate the injunction and return it to Whyte. The Court was not convinced Microsoft had violated Sun's copyright.
That copyright also is a sticking point in Sun's plan to make Java an international standard, which is a requirement for some potential customers.
At press time, Sun was withholding its specification from European industry association ECMA, which so far has declined to maintain Sun's copyright through the standards process and is now attempting to move forward without Sun. Microsoft is an ECMA member and vowed last spring to introduce "improvements" to Java.
"The ECMA copyright policy has not changed over the last 38 years," says ECMA secretary general Jan van den Beld. "At this moment, it is premature to assume that ECMA will change its copyright policy because, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
