Jumping the Gun?

Several years ago, the Web was jump-started into hyperactive growth by an upstart company that hijacked the development of HTML from the standards bodies that were ostensibly in charge of it.

In the past year, we've seen a few other companies step up and attempt to steal the fire from, not just a half-baked markup language, but from a flagship product of a major company. We're talking, of course, about Java and the various third-party gimmicks that threaten it.

The parallels in this situation are important, but the differences are even more important. Granted, then and now, there was a demand for things in a prevailing standard that weren't available--and some people made their own solutions, and some of them began to sell them. Of course, then and now, there's money in it for the people who end up holding the copyright to the most widely accepted solution at the end of the day.

However, HTML was the "property" of a standards committee--the W3C. Without beating around the bush too much, complaints that a standards committee is failing to move quickly enough to evolve a technology are far more likely to be justified than complaints of sloth regarding a commercial product--especially a commercial software product, in which it's in the immediate financial best interests of corporate owners to make their products grow as fast as they can.

Java is not the creation of academics and standard-makers. It's a commercial product, and a commercially defined standard. An interesting difference.

Another difference is that, where before there were a number of companies attempting to offer "HTML, plus something extra," there are relatively few who are aggressively attempting to do so for Java. Principally, they are Microsoft and Netscape, and of these two, Microsoft is winning all the points in the aggression race by a large margin.

Why So Anxious?

The line between "hijacking" and simply "extending" is blurry in the extreme. Java is designed for expansion. Anyone can make Java packages, and, in fact, they're supposed to.

acme.awt.button is just as plausible for use as java.awt.button, and the going theory is that companies and individuals should enrich or entertain themselves by selling or giving away packages of tools that they've written for Java. Naturally you'd expect the directions of those development efforts to be toward unexplored and undiscovered software components, and most of the time they are.

However, there are those third-party classes that, rather than blazing new trails, attempt to compete with the already established solutions. And it gets even more interesting when the established solution in question happens to be the Java API.

Microsoft has taken the role of an industry leader among third-party Java developers. The company's been aggressive and powerful. An early licensee, it's got a long list of accomplishments, including a JVM and development environment, as well as a number of publicly available Java classes: the "Microsoft Enhancements for Java," including, among other things, the overhyped Application Foundation Classes.

We'll be covering these enhancements in greater detail in the coming weeks, but for the moment we can characterize them, very roughly, as being in one of two classes, with the first being genuinely new development efforts, and the second being Java packages that provide "direct" access to other Microsoft products such as bits of ActiveX, Win32, and the like.

That seems on the surface to be a simple tack for Microsoft to take--making its other software features (such as they are) available to Java programmers. But underneath the surface, it's an unusual move. Java is fundamentally more than just a good programming language--it's a cross-platform operating system, after a fashion.

The purpose of its API is to eliminate the need for you or I to have to become enmeshed in Windows 95 or NT interface complexities. It's there to provide one standard (a simple, well-written and usable one), and to take care of the ugly details for us. As long as it works, why go into Java just to come back out again?

There are answers to this question--some boring; some very, very interesting. And then, as if the plot weren't thick enough, there's J/Direct. But don't worry, we'll be right here to examine them in the weeks to come. Stay tuned.