A Rundown of Sun's JavaOne Conference

It would be remiss to let the week go by without at least commenting on the JavaOne conference sponsored by Sun. Were there any surprises at the show? Didn't seem to be, but we'll tell you what we heard so you can judge for yourself.

The usual players got to show up and give speeches. In addition to the major names at Sun, James Gosling, billed as lead engineer and a "key architect" of Java, and Alan Baratz, the President of Javasoft and of Delphi fame, were at the top of the list. What did they have to say? It was mostly evangelistic rhetoric.

The list of Java's growing set of target markets was iterated and reiterated. Microsoft was bashed in no small amount--ActiveX was made the target of a particularly well-orchestrated security demonstration by Mr. Baratz--perhaps indicating, curiously, that Javasoft fears Microsoft in some real capacity. We've already made it clear that ActiveX and Java aren't really in competition--they basically do different things. Aside from general industry-wide resentment, we wonder what worries them so much. Or more accurately, we wonder what Microsoft has up their sleeve.

The promotional heat continues to be stoked under JavaBeans; Symantec, Borland, and Sun all pledged vigilant support in their upcoming development systems. We are amused to hear the rumor of drag-an-drop application builders suitable for the layman floating around again. Why, you ask? This rumor has been amusing us for years. It will probably continue to be amusing us forever.

Nonetheless, the Beans system has a number of believable and interesting benefits, and we're pleased to see it coming to fruition so quickly.

There was the obligatory set of organizations at the show presenting their success stories. We were pleased to see some of these were actually important, reputable groups with some reasonably interesting things to say about their experiences. NASA, for instance, was represented, as was the illustrious Human Genome Project.

We watched closely to see who would pop up hawking Java applications, and were somewhat disappointed in that we didn't see anything clearly leading of the pack. The majority of the presenters appear to have been, as would be expected, following just a few not terribly original, although still important, themes. There were the Web people who were waiting for something (anything) to provide interuser communication; groupware abounded, some of it clever, some of it boring, but in general not especially tied to Java other than its being the most viable medium of the moment.

There were the ever-present "database people," also expediently taking advantage of Java to tie various popular database packages to their Web pages, with various bits of window dressing thrown in. Perhaps more intrinsically tied to Java, we noticed a small proliferation of companies writing code for Java-based desktop environments. We find it interesting. The idea behind most is simply to leverage the cross-platform uniformity of the JVM to create a ubiquitous, cross-platform user environment. Whether or not this will become a profitable business, especially considering that Sun is basically a competitor . . . well, we're curious to see how it all turns out.

The standouts? Corel, of course, was there. It's office product is the first of its kind, and we're waiting to see if Corel can make it efficient enough to be usable. If they can, they stand to be the ones to cash in on a large-scale adoption of Java as a platform. An interesting gamble, to say the least. We were also amused by talk of a Windows emulator for Java. High irony, to say the least. Certainly, highly ambitious.

What surprised us most? Dana Carvey showed up. We weren't expecting a professional comedian. Are we stiff necked for thinking they might have been smarter to have saved some entertainment money and spent it on salaries to keep Java team members from leaving for lucrative outside offers? But no matter. We heard he actually was pretty funny.

Our final impression was one of satisfaction; it's not often in this industry we get to see a gutsy bunch of optimists gather to support a great new technology that actually has a good shot at getting really big. Next year's show should be really interesting. Until then, back to the grind. See you next week.

Past installments of Java Jolt