HP, others rally Java developers against Sun

May 7, 1999 — Timed to coincide with Sun Microsystems’ announcement yesterday of its progress toward making Java an international standard, members of the Real-Time Java Working Group formed the J Consortium, an incorporated formalized spin-off of the Working Group with the specific goal of developing Java specifications for submission as international standards.

The J Consortium, including members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Aonix, NewMonics, and OMRON, said it is based on the “principle of open vendor-neutral industry standards” — a clear dig at Sun, which was recently forced to rethink its efforts to push a Java standard through the International Standards Organization (ISO) when the company decided the ISO’s rules governing standards control by private companies were unacceptable.

The J Consortium is concerned primarily with the creation of standard real-time Java extensions, such as those used in ground-to-air command control systems. According to the J Consortium, Java is not well suited to real-time tasks, because “its task-switching primitives are incomplete or inoperative, and its underlying memory mechanism takes unpredictable amounts of time during routine operation.”

Sun said real-time extensions are currently being developed under the Java Community Process, led by IBM, and will ultimately be submitted to the ISO and other standards bodies for consideration as an international standard.

“[J Consortium members] have been working in this space for a long time now with no success whatever,” said a Sun representative. “We will continue to work to out-innovate them, and we know there isn’t much industry interest in the J Consortium…its goal is not to advance the technology.”

According to the J Consortium, more than 25 companies have already expressed an interest in joining the group.

“The intense world-wide interest shown in our organization is a clear indication that we have struck a nerve,” said Dave Wood, marketing chair for the J Consortium. “The creators and suppliers of real-time and embedded applications comprehend the importance of consistent, open, and internationally recognized standards that will permit them not only to develop high-performance and deterministic real-time Java applications, but to do so with the confidence of high portability and reliability. The people out there who are spending huge amounts of money developing and deploying these kinds of applications hunger for an independent and trustworthy approach to secure their investments.”

Informal membership in the group is free of charge, said the J Consortium, making it eligible to “maintain” (read: control) a standard once it has been approved by the ISO.

“In our process, anyone interested can contribute to the creation of specifications,” said Wendy Fong, chairman of the J Consortium. “Our goal is to create specifications that can be submitted to a consensus-based standards organization so the entire real-time community can benefit.”

Sun has been criticized widely for its iron grip on the Java language, but staunchly defends the Java Community Process (JCP) as an open, consensus-based forum for the development of Java specifications. In addition, claims Sun, placing Java under the newly devised Sun Community Source License Model has further opened up the language, resulting in some 10,000 new licensees since the model was established some six weeks ago.

Still, HP and Sun have butted heads over Java on other occasions as well. At the core of the HP’s agenda is its own ChaiVM, a clean-room version of the Java language — developed exclusively by HP over dissatisfaction with Sun’s control of Java — and to which Microsoft recently tied its Universal Plug and Play instant networking technology in an effort to undermine Sun’s Jini.

Sun has thwarted past efforts by the Working Group to take control of Java real-time extensions. In January, Sun successfully lobbied for a rejection of the Working Group’s proposal to the National Committee for Information Technology Standardization (NCITS) to manage development around real-time extensions.