Sun works on Java 2 technologies deployment tools

June 21, 1999 — Recognizing that managing the version control and updates of the 15 Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technologies may be daunting, Sun Microsystems is working on platform-deployment tools and processes that will debut late this year.

“In the next six months, we’ll define tools that also manage the deployment in an environment where we will be upgrading [different aspects of J2EE],” said Alan Baratz, president of software products and platforms at Sun, in Cupertino, CA.

“Going forward, a subsequent release of J2EE might change some components and not all the others. And you want to upgrade your server without having to pull out all your code,” Baratz explained last week at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. “What this does is provide tools that manage versioning and upgrades.”

Sun will not issue Java specifications for upgrading, but it will deliver a product for those upgrades, most likely on Solaris platforms, though Baratz expects other companies to build similar technology.

“I suspect other companies will be doing this too. I’d be surprised if tools like IBM’s VisualAge for Java and Inprise’s Borland JBuilder don’t have that capability,” Baratz said.

Sun is also now shopping aggressively to buy a tools vendor to fill in a gap in its own platform offerings, Baratz said, though he noted that Sun will not develop such tools on its own. Although analysts point to Inprise and Symantec as likely candidates for Sun’s buying spree, Symantec officials, who recently announced that the company will break out its Java tools division, said the company is not for sale.

“We’re not selling. We looked at that option and rejected it,” said Mansour Safai, vice president of Symantec’s Internet tools division, in Cupertino, CA.

Inprise, however, said it had no comment on a sale to Sun. Baratz said that Inprise’s recent 25 million patent dispute settlement with Microsoft would not preclude Inprise from being of interest to Sun, though he had no further comment on a purchase.

Moreover, Inprise is building Extensible Markup Language-based tools that target cross-platform Internet development, which may make it more attractive to Sun.

“By 2000, you’ll see the announcement of significant new tools from Inprise for Internet development,” said Jeffrey Barca-Hall, vice president of tools development at Inprise, in Scotts Valley, CA.

Meanwhile, IBM said that Sun’s announcement of work on Java platform-deployment tools would fill a critical need.

“This is a problem we’ve had in the field for years,” said David Boloker, Java chief technologist at IBM, in Cambridge, MA. “This is something we’re very interested in doing. Maybe they have something we could look into.”

In other JavaOne news, Sun last week delivered the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), which is now being used in some versions of 3Com’s Palm Computing division’s PalmPilot handheld devices, as well as Motorola devices. J2ME features the K Virtual Machine, a small-footprint Java virtual machine. The market-leading PalmPilot will become the reference platform for the new technology.

In addition to debuting J2ME, Sun officially described J2EE, a set of 15 services due by year’s end, which includes the JavaServer Pages (JSP), Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, and Java Messaging Services (JMS) specifications.

The alphabet soup of specifications is designed to give Java-based platform and application makers the keys to unlock Internet commerce by coalescing the CORBA-based services underlying newer Web-based servers and tapping back into legacy data and applications in one fell swoop.

Sun also said it is considering making Linux a reference port for the HotSpot and Java 2 technologies, in addition to the current Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT versions.

“We have a relationship with Linux and would like to be closer. We’re looking at ways to do that,” Baratz said.

Sun also said that by year’s end Java 2 technology will be included in alliance partner America Online’s client distribution CD, distributed to as many as 100 million users worldwide. In addition, Netscape — now a part of AOL — will deliver the next iterations of its Communicator 5.0 client with Java 2 technology and HotSpot.

Sun also announced that the market-leading Apache Web server development community organization would bring support for JSP to the free, open-source server.

With the licensing of JSP technology to the Apache developer community, a move ushered into fruition by IBM, a project is under way within the Apache open-source developer community to develop JSP technology for Apache.

It also marks a milestone in that the JSP specification is more open than other Java technology under Sun’s hybrid standards process.

Sun also announced Java Message Queue, message-oriented middleware for letting enterprises and service providers manage the flow of information between networked applications. The product, based on technology from Enron Communications, is the first Sun implementation of the JMS API.

Sun announced broader acceptance of pure Java on clients, with Tao Group, Insignia Solutions, and Access committing to building Java-compliant technology for many types of networked devices. The companies will make their respective embedded virtual machine technologies compliant with Sun’s Java platforms for embedded devices, the announcement said.

Sun also released the Java TV API specification, which looks to bring Java to the digital television market. Sun and NTT DoCoMo also delivered prototypes of NTT DoCoMo’s Java technology-enabled i-mode wireless phones and services.