Can Sun loosen its java apron strings?

Sun Microsystems celebrated the fifth birthday of its Java programming language last week at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

Java has grown from humble beginnings to almost unmatched popularity - although question marks continue to hang over Sun's stewardship of its baby.

Java started its commercial life as a programming language for developing client packages that would run on any operating system or processor. Within a couple of years, Sun began to push it as a tool for writing back-end applications.

Sun is now targeting the emerging wireless sector and plans to make Java a major player in set-top boxes, cars, cellphones and other non-PC devices.

According to Gartner analyst Mark Driver, Java is mature and industry momentum is growing behind the revamped Java 2 Micro Edition. He expects a number of vendors to release Java-enabled devices from the second half of this year and throughout 2001. This will shadow the explosive growth in internet access devices.

But on top of the challenges Sun faces in trying to exploit the gadget market, it must find a way of encouraging programmers to think of Java, rather than Windows, when building their applications.

Rikki Kirzner, an analyst at IDC, said that the number of Java developer seats grew to 1.3 million last year from 789,000 in 1998, and estimated that this will rise to 1.9 million by the end of this year and to 4.4 million by 2003.

Dissent among the ranks
Over the last year, however, Java has been losing popularity in the open source community, the work of which underpins so many of the standard technologies of the internet, and which Sun is keen to woo.

Critics within the community accuse Sun of turning its back on any true standardisation efforts by retaining too much control. Some major vendors, led by Microsoft, are pushing for standards that are ratified by an independent organisation.

This is despite Sun's commitment, for the time being at least, to continue deciding on Java's technical future via its consultative Java Community Process (JCP).

Pat Sueltz, president of Sun's software products and platforms group, who moved to the vendor from IBM last autumn, claimed that letting Java go would be an evolutionary process. She said Sun has retained such a tight hold over the language to nurture it and ensure it did not splinter, while at the same time trying to ensure innovation continued.

"We did the same thing with the network file system with Sun's Unix operating system, Solaris, and just turned that over to the standards body. We are committed to open standards, to compatibility.

"What I don't want is to see Java take off in a way that would cause a fragmentation of the technology," she said.

Easing off
But Sun appears to be loosening its grip on the JCP a little. At JavaOne, it announced the creation of two executive committees to oversee the body: one handling desktop and server development, the other dealing with the embedded space.

Sueltz said the development committee is developing a Java application programming interface (API) for XML Messaging because Java and XML fit together like "hand and glove". The aim is to deliver a specification that enables developers to build Java-based ecommerce software that can generate and exchange messages using XML.

But according to Gartner, growing industry support for Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition specification for developing server based applications is testament to the proposed changes to the JCP. Such modifications seem to have quieted the concerns of many software firms over Sun's perceived role as "benevolent dictator" and standard bearer of Java technology.

But if the proposed modifications to the JCP fail to foster a more collaborative environment for enhancing Java's functionality, users can expect more aggressive efforts to introduce clones that are free of Sun's intellectual property.