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What's brewing in Java's future?

Developers sound off on their anxieties, hopes, and fears about the future of Java on the Windows platform

By Jeff Friesen, JavaWorld.com, 07/24/99

Page 2 of 7

But on the other side of the coin, some say Sun's attempt to have the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardize Java is just as dangerous a threat to the language. Some industry observers are unhappy about Sun's insistence that ISO give Sun complete maintenance control over the continued evolution of Java technology. In their minds, giving total control of a technology standard to a single company sets a dangerous precedent.

Competing visions

Sun and Microsoft have vastly different visions of Java's future. Simply put, Sun wants Java to exist as a platform-independent solution for building distributed applications, while Microsoft wants Java to exist as a platform-dependent solution for building Windows applications. As a result of these competing visions, developers are split over which flavor of Java to use, and whether or not competition is a good thing.

While competition is good in many areas, some developers feel that this has been less true for those bringing a programming language to maturity. The concerns of Mark Donaghue, a Java developer at Kanjisoft Systems in Quincy, MA, are typical of anxious developers who see Microsoft's recent Java strategy as a threat to the basic philosophy of the language. Although he expresses interest in Microsoft's Visual J++ and Windows Foundation Classes (WFC) technologies, he strongly feels that they betray the essence of Java's multiplatform capabilities.

"Much as I would love to use the WFC capabilities of Visual J++, it's more important to preserve the cross-platform capabilities of the language," Donaghue said. "If Microsoft succeeds in killing cross-platform Java, its dominance will be assured, and thus we will suffer from being at the mercy of a single company. A monopolistic situation means prices go up, quality goes down."

Other developers feel that such competition is an essential part of the process. This school of thought holds that what doesn't kill Java will make it stronger. Johannes Hubert, the lead Java developer at Novemail Systems in Gothenburg, Sweden, thinks that Microsoft's pressure to enhance Java's weaker areas will ultimately be good for the language.

"It is my impression that Sun is indeed handling the Java issue in a very dictatorial manner. I understand their problems and vision to keep Java clean, but I think they are just a tad too slow to accept new ideas, especially ones that don't come from Sun," Hubert said. "Actually, there are many projects going on that are moving Java in other directions than Sun's, or in the same direction, only faster -- for example, HP's 'clean-room' initiative. Only those projects don't get half the press and not a tenth of the criticism Microsoft would get if it did the same thing. Competition will keep Sun on its toes."

The lawsuit and the injunction

Microsoft originally licensed Java technology for use with its products back in 1996. As a licensee, Microsoft was expected to support an entire release of Java within the time frame defined by that release's license. But things didn't quite work out as expected.

 

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