JAVA finally comes of age
LONDON: It may sound hard to believe, but a decade ago, Sun’s Java computer language was one of the hottest topics in technology. Netscape was going to write its new applications in Java, Java applets were going to dominate the web, universities and colleges were starting to teach it as their standard programming language, while its advocates and some of the more starry-eyed advocates and journalists imagined it overturning Microsoft.
All this turned James Gosling -- who is considered the father of Java -- into something of a superstar. In recognition of his achievements, he has just been awarded the Order Of Canada, his country’s highest honour. “I have to go and get whacked with a sword,” says Gosling.
BACKLASH: After the years of hype there came, inevitably, the years of backlash. Netscape dumped its Java programming efforts, and Java applets failed to make any impact on the web. In 2001, a Salon online magazine headline called Java slow, ugly and irrelevant, and in 2005, a Business Week article proclaimed: Java? It’s So Nineties. Microsoft -- locked out of Java after losing a lawsuit -- developed its own Java-style language, C#, which became widely used, while most of the advocates moved on to trendier languages: Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Ajax, Jason and so on.
Now things are, happily, coming back to a more even keel, so I was pleased to catch up with Gosling at last week’s Java conference. He’s a big man who speaks slowly, and at the end of a long day, he’s as laid back as you can get in an upright chair.
The major development is that Sun is making its Java platforms open source under the Free Software Foundation’s GPL (general public licence) following years of complaints by IBM, so I ask him if that’s going to make any difference. He points out that “Java has been functioning largely as an open source project for many years” and that “the source code has been available for a long time”. All Sun has done is switch to using “one of the more commonly accepted” open licences.
“To be honest, the biggest thing we get is that a bunch of the important Linux distributions such as Debian can now put (Java) in the box,” he says. As for IBM, “they’ve engaged in all kinds of stunts,” says Gosling. “There was that Open Letter that Rod Smith wrote saying ‘Oh, Sun, you should go open source’, and of course that was complete puffery. It wouldn’t have made any difference to them because they already had all the rights that anybody could ever want. And when we did actually change the licence, IBM was really upset. They wanted a licence that said they could do whatever they damn well pleased. So we went for a GPL licence that says: ‘We’re sharing so you have to reciprocate by sharing too’. That seems fair. They wanted us to give them everything and for them to give nothing back.”
Sun previously resisted going open source because the GPL allows the code to be forked -- different groups of developers could take it down different, incompatible paths. “Yeah, and a bunch of years ago, I think that was a fairly valid concern,” says Gosling, “but it’s become pretty clear that the market really values compatibility. If people start doing incompatible forks, market pressure is probably going to be a more effective enforcer of compatibility than a licence would be.”
“The future of Java for me really is wherever the developers take it. Probably the biggest place where Java is used in anger is enterprise computing, and that’s gotten to be one of its most mature and solid areas. I don’t think there’s going to be much dramatic change there for the next five years. The most interesting stuff is at the edge points where there are different kinds of devices connected to the network.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service