Sun pushes Java for consumers at JavaOne conference in San

June 15, 1999 — Sun Microsystems is aiming Java at the consumer market this week, as it tries to take its cross-platform programming language beyond the enterprise and make it popular in mass-produced devices like cellular phones, handheld computers, digital televisions, and more.

“The Java platform is now the mainstay for enterprise computing and is rapidly moving into consumer markets,” Alan Baratz, head of Sun’s Java software group, said in a keynote speech on the first day of the company’s JavaOne conference here.

For consumers, the push from Sun will give service providers more technology options for delivering interactive, Web-based services to the army of networked consumer devices that are expected to proliferate in the coming years, including smart phones and handheld PCs.

Baratz was joined on stage by Robin Abrams, head of 3Com’s Palm computer unit, who announced plans to integrate Java more closely with 3Com’s Palm OS. The tighter integration will make it easier for developers to write Java applications that will run on the popular Palm computer, Abrams said.

Baratz also disclosed JavaTV, a new Java API for televisions developed with consumer electronics heavyweights including Matsushita Electric Industrial, Samsung Electronics, and Philips Electronics.

“With the JavaTV API, developers can easily create interactive TV services and content and deliver them via cable set-top boxes, satellite receivers, and digital television,” Baratz said. The final specification is expected to be ready by the fourth quarter.

Also for consumers, Baratz showed off a prototype of a next-generation wireless phone developed with Japan’s NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT DoCoMo). Using Java, the phone will be secure enough to support services like online banking and trading, he said.

Momentum behind Java is still growing, as the reported attendance at JavaOne this week shows. An estimated 20,000 developers will attend the four-day show, up from 14,000 last year, and out of a total of 1.7 million Java developers worldwide, Baratz said.

By next year it’s estimated that Java developers will outnumber developers writing in C++ code, Baratz said to applause, although he didn’t say where he got that figure from.

The Java chief also highlighted a new, three-tiered architecture for Java 2, which tries to package together the tools and software that developers need to build applications for different sized computers. The components are Java 2 Standard Edition, for PCs and workstations; Java 2 Enterprise Edition, for building server applications; and Java 2 Micro Edition, for handheld and consumer devices.

Using Micro Edition, programmers can now write a Java application in such a way that different parts of the application are stored in different parts of a network. For example, a two-way pager developed by Motorola includes a small JVM housed in the pager itself, with the application’s Java class libraries stored on a server.

One criticism leveled at Java has been that it uses too much memory for small consumer devices, and Micro Edition is in part an attempt to address that criticism. It includes the new K virtual machine (KVM), a small memory-footprint JVM.

For Java 2 Standard Edition, Sun will focus on performance improvements and getting the platform more widely distributed. The company today announced a deal with America Online in which AOL will start distributing Standard Edition to users with its AOL installation disk in December.

The deal with AOL will help Sun get the latest version of its JVM to users’ desktops — in particular on Microsoft Windows desktops — allowing those users to run the latest Java programs, Baratz said.

A few software developers at the show said they are happy with the way Java is progressing.

“The language is coming along nicely,” said Bryan Keller, a Java developer with Pangea Systems in Oakland, California. Pangea makes bioinformatics software — or software that leverages information technology for research and development in the life sciences.

“We run on (Windows) NT and Solaris, and we use clients for Unix and Macintosh, so cross-platform compatibility is probably the most important thing to us,” Keller said.