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Java 1997: A detailed look at where Java's going this year and in the near future
Java has made a tremendous splash in its short life. Find out how industry strategies and hardware/software innovations will affect the future of this prodigy
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Current VMs such as Navigator's and Internet Explorer's use Java 1.02. New Java 1.1 data type features will not work on current software. Developers are left in a quandary. Back in November '96, I suggested to Eric Schmidt, former CTO of Sun, that there was probably only room for one or two changes to the virtual machine. He agreed and said I was probably being generous with the numbers. I fear that if more VMs are developed after 1.1, the Java market will be fragmented considerably. Let's hope 1.1 is the final VM.
The new class libraries
Java 1.1 also saw the addition of new class libraries, as well as expanded existing libraries. Licensees -- including Microsoft
-- are required to incorporate core APIs six months after first customer ship (FCS). Class libraries are divided into core
APIs and extension APIs. Most of the new class libraries belong to core APIs. These include: Java Database Connection (JDBC),
class library signing, Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Internationalization, and JavaBeans (including the new event model),
Introspection, and Persistence. These APIs have been covered in great detail in many trade journals and books. Suffice it
to say, the additions are fundamentally sound and give Java the level of functionality required for large-scale enterprise
deployment.
At JavaOne back in April, JavaSoft announced the Java Foundation Classes (JFC). Based on Netscape's Internet Foundation Classes, these are sets of GUI components layered on the AWT and IFC. It is crucial that the JFC be rolled out quickly. In fact, it is disappointing that JavaSoft didn't release a high-performance set of GUI components earlier.
Show me the IIOP
On the down side, one major piece of functionality that should have been included in Java 1.1 (and is sorely missing) is support
for the Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP). Distributed-object fiends understand the tragedy of this oversight. But for you
readers who are not privy to the IIOP story, I'll try to give the world's fastest IIOP explanation now.
The Object Management Group has defined a standard for how objects can interact across machine boundaries. The standard is called Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). This standard defines how a piece of software -- called an Object Request Broker (ORBs) -- exposes local objects for use by ORBs on other machines or process spaces. The protocol used by the ORBs for communication is IIOP. To expose an object to an ORB, or to use an object, the interface to the object must be defined using the Interface Definition Language (IDL). IDL is similar to C/C++ header files.
On the surface, this process may seem very similar to RMI and Microsoft's DCOM. However, CORBA is technically superior. Developers will be able to easily make their objects transactional, concurrent, and persistent (among other characteristics) by mixing in vendor-supplied libraries.
IIOP in two paragraphs. I think that's a new record! For a more detailed analysis of CORBA and IIOP, I recommend you read one of Dan Harkey and Robert Orfali's classic client/server and distributed object books.
- Feedback
Resources
- Object Management Group and CORBA:
http://www.omg.org/ - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the Java Venture Fund:
http://www.kpcb.com - Visigenic's Java to IDL compiler Caffeine:
http://www.pomoco.com/news/netcaff.html - JavaSoft's Java API overview:
http://www.javasoft.com/products/api-overview.html - JavaSoft's Beans specification:
http://splash.javasoft.com/beans/ - JavaSoft's 100% Pure Java initiative:
http://www.javasoft.com/100percent/index.html - JavaSoft's next AWT, including JFC:
http://www.javasoft.com:80/products/jdk/1.1/docs/guide/awt/designspec/nextAWT.html - Netscape's Java documentation, including server- and client-side Java:
http://developer.netscape.com/library/documentation/index.html - Microsoft's Java products and strategy:
http://www.microsoft.com/java/sdk/ - IBM's Java efforts:
http://www.ibm.com/java/platform_solutions.html - IBM's Network Computing Framework:
http://www.software.ibm.com/ebusiness/ - IBM's alphaWorks:
http://alphaworks.ibm.com - And don't miss JavaWorld columnist William Blundon enter his opinion on the subject in his article "How Microsoft is broadening Java's scope"
- For a look at how you can improve Java's I/O performance, check out Nick Zhang's Java tip:
"How to improve Java's I/O performance"
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