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Sun's Keller: No plans to join Eclipse

Status quo remains, with company promoting NetBeans

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 07/11/05

July 11, 2005—Joe Keller is vice president of marketing for Java Web Services and Tools at Sun Microsystems, responsible for driving the company's product direction in these areas. Previously, he was involved in the company's iPlanet division, where he minded integration and commerce application technologies. Before joining Sun, he managed the sale of artificial intelligence products at Texas Instruments. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke with Keller at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco about where Java is today and where it is headed, along with touching on the progress of Web services and ongoing questions about whether Sun might join the Eclipse Foundation.

InfoWorld: There was a lot of talk this morning about the NetBeans open source tools platform. I think it could be argued that NetBeans doesn't really have the reception in the market that Eclipse does, although some would disagree with that. So where is NetBeans headed?

Keller: We're going to continue to invest in NetBeans. We think there is room for choice in development tools and we'll continue to drive that. We'll continue to be, if you will, supportive of Java communities, like Eclipse and others. We think there is room for a development tool that provides functionality for those developing for all of the Java platforms. So we'll continue to invest in NetBeans, and I think you saw a number of demonstrations of that technology supporting development of applications for the Java Micro Edition platform. Earlier in the week, you saw continuing support for developers who are looking for an easy-to-develop tool set in Java Studio Creator. And you saw the movement forward [of] our enterprise developers in a number of different projects.

IW: Are there any discussions about Sun joining Eclipse?

Keller: Not currently. It's something that we went through and evaluated, but we decided that it wasn't something that was appropriate for Sun to do and that we would continue investing in excellent tools.

IW: Is Java truly portable? Haven't there been some extensions specific to particular vendors' technologies?

Keller: Well, Java's truly portable. And the notion of people building additional Java classes is part of every application that you do. It's when people require those in a platform sense that they build a dependency that people have to be aware of. And the issue for most developers is not being aware of that dependency when they build on top of extra classes. That's usually the issue for folks. That is a piece of information a developer needs to know when choosing to write to those extra classes.

IW: Last night I was at a presentation where there were audience members who were pretty frustrated with Web services and WSDL [Web Services Description Language] in particular. Do you think Web services has been over-hyped?

Keller: No, I don't think it's been over-hyped. I think the challenge is it's still early in Web services and building the interfaces for them. I think the frustration you're hearing is we're still learning how to build these interfaces, how to build them well, how to build the tooling for them, how to make them practical for applications. And it is why we build a set of technologies and deliver them in something called the Java Web Services Developer Pack, which [features] APIs and our Web services support. Any developer can take and download [that for] use in their IDE and their application server and their Web server in their Java SE [Standard Edition] runtime, in their Java EE [Enterprise Edition] runtime to allow them to get access to the latest and greatest implementation of the Java APIs for doing Web services. One of the things we just put into the developer pack is an acceleration technology. One of the frustrations is people would like Web services transports to go faster. This version of the developer pack we shipped this week has a binary encoding capability that is based on standards from the ITU that allow us to encode a binary form of the communication and send that between nodes at a faster pace. Our benchmarks to date show anywhere from a 150 to 400 percent [increase]. And so that helps us address some of the frustrations that people see.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

 

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