Java 2 development kit making its way to Linux

March 3, 1999 — An informal group of Linux developers known as the Linux Blackdown Porting Team is scheduled to make an implementation of Java 2 for Linux available this week.

Officials from Sun Microsystems, which showed the programming kit at its booth during the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA, this week, said Sun opted to work with the Blackdown team rather than develop the implementation itself as part of an effort to broaden the base of Java without overextending company resources.

While interest in Java among independent software developers is high, Linus Torvalds, reluctant hero of the open source and Linux community, has been frequently critical of Sun’s proprietary ownership of what is essentially a programming language.

As a result, it is unlikely that Java technologies will be used in the core Linux operating system anytime soon, but vendors such as Caldera and Graphon plan to make use of Java in their Linux offerings.

Graphon, for example, will use Java to link thin clients to Linux servers, while Caldera plans to make use of Enterprise JavaBeans to better integrate server applications.

Sun has also licensed the Blackdown group to bring Sun application programming interfaces — including the Java 3D API, the Java Multimedia Framework API, the Java Advanced Imaging API, and the Java Sound API — to Linux.

Sun officials stressed Java’s extensibility to Linux.

“All these applications written for Java, they’re going to run on Linux,” said Anand Palaniswamy, Sun’s virtual machine engineer, based in East Palo Alto, CA, at the LinuxWorld Expo on Tuesday.

Although Sun has not yet formalized plans, extending Sun applications to Linux via Java is a logical direction, said Kenneth P. Tallman, senior product manager for Sun’s Java Technology Marketing Group, based in Palo Alto, CA. Sun offers applications in areas such as messaging and directories.

“Once everything’s on Java, [it] should run everywhere,” Tallman said.