Internet World: Java’s real role

San Mateo (12/15/97) — Much like the Byrds singing “Jesus Is Just Alright With Me,” many third-party and corporate developers are beginning to voice the same feelings about Java.

During the past two years, Sun Microsystems Inc.’s marketing machine has done a remarkable job of selling the technical magic of Java and luring thousands of ISVs and corporate developers.

At last week’s Internet World ’97 show in New York, Sun continued its religious crusade, this time talking more about how JavaSoft will ready Java for enterprise deployment. The company released a completed draft of the Enterprise JavaBeans specification, which, when implemented by vendors, will give organizations a platform for building server-side Java components.

In a keynote speech at Internet World, JavaSoft President Alan Baratz said that information technology needs to adopt the old adage of “out with the old, in with the new,” by essentially accepting a programming platform that lets software work on any operating system. To no one’s surprise, Baratz was referring to Java.

But despite last week’s continued crusade by Sun, there are signs from some development quarters that the heat from the company’s Bible-thumping approach is beginning to cool.

There appears now to be two perspectives forming among developers that center around the technology: Java the religion; and Java the technical reality. Clearly, many developers have not lost their faith in the technology and its capability to lower users’ dependence on a single supplier of technology, such as Microsoft. But other developers are becoming more agnostic toward Java, seeing it as merely one good solution among several for solving a limited set of problems. The latter believe the technology has a long way to go before it is versatile and powerful enough to be the enterprise-wide cure-all that Sun officials have been preaching it now is.

“Java is seductive because it removes things like memory management and garbage collecting, and you can run it everywhere for simple stuff,” said Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet and is now president of Trellix, a start-up in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But now they are trying to add security and other sophisticated things and have it go up against Windows, which has been around for much longer. I think that is wrong. Java is important, but it is not everything.”

Other observers agree with Bricklin’s assessment.

“All this evangelism has got Java incredible amounts of attention in record time,” said Jim Balderston, a senior analyst at Zona Research, in Redwood City, California. “However, the dark side of this marketing blitz is that it is not meeting all the promises. I don’t think any technology from any vendor could. Some [developers] we talk to are beginning to ask, `Well, what can this technology really do?'”

What Java can really do at this point is create cross-platform applets and departmental applications more quickly than most of its competitors.

In a recent white paper based on research conducted among 279 midsize and large end-user companies, Zona officials described the beginnings of a trend to make “top-down” strategic decisions on Java, rather than tactical decisions from lower down in the organization.

“Java application deployment is positioned to grow dramatically over the next two or three years,” the report concluded.

However, the study made it clear that the vast majority of those surveyed were not stitching their Java development projects into mission-critical applications and that such projects would remain isolated at the department level. Moreover, the study concluded that the spending for Java projects tended to be ad hoc and experimental, rather than central to companies’ information technology budgets.

So far Java’s rapid rise has been to the middle of the heap, with the hike to the top looking a little bit more arduous.

In particular, Microsoft certainly has no religious zeal for Java. From the start, the company’s technical and political stance has been that Java is just one of a few good programming languages and is well-suited for only certain kinds of software development.

“There is Java, the hype, and then there is `Oh, you actually want to build and deliver products with it?'” said Charles Fitzgerald, program manager of the Internet client and collaboration division at Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington. “No one yet is talking about Java being the center of the universe. It is an interesting way to build components, but it is not anyone’s central organizing theme.”

Sun, of course, contends that Microsoft uses such criticisms as an excuse to avoid helping to establish the technology as a standard. Even when Microsoft publicly states its support for Java, however tepid, Sun has accused the company of doing so only to yank the proposed standard in a direction that best benefits Windows.

“Microsoft protesting Java is like Kleenex complaining about a cure for the common cold,” said Sun president and CEO Scott McNealy at the GartnerGroup conference in Orlando in October.

Although more organizations are thinking about Java’s programming possibilities, few have begun meaningful development projects. Some are hesitant because of what they see as its technical limitations, and others simply do not want to be the pioneers who end up wearing arrow shirts with their careers.

“I’d rather let the banks and insurance companies be the first to roll out Java applications. If they mess it up they only lose people’s money,” quipped Susan Robinson, manager of systems programming at the Western New York Regional Information Center, in Buffalo, New York, which offers a range of technology services, including teachers’ payrolls, for more than 100 school districts. “But if we mess up, someone’s report card goes to the wrong place or district school teachers don’t get paid. We are in a very political arena.”

Indeed, until the shipment of the Java Development Kit 1.1.1 this past third quarter, many basic functions, such as printing the graphical elements in a Web document, were either a chore or impossible. The dearth of such fundamental capabilities has undermined the confidence of some developers by giving it a toy-language image, some observers said.

“This lack of some basic printing support points out that Java still can’t be used for a lot of practical applications,” said Richard Smith, president of Phar Lap Software, a development company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Some observers believe it would help Sun’s cause if the company could point to an applet or application with features and capabilities that could not be matched by an application created in C++ or any other programming language. Until that happens, many developers say they are comfortable continuing to write in their current programming environment.

“Is there any [Java-based] application out there that could not be written in Visual Basic? I don’t think so,” Trellix’s Bricklin said. “McNealy says he can never talk about just one great or unique Java application because there are thousands. Well, then he should pick one.”

One systems engineer with a large east coast company hit closer to the bone by criticizing Java’s most essential capability, which is to write an application once and have it run seamlessly on another platform.

“Java is just filled with code that makes portability a near miss in many situations,” the engineer said. “Ultimately it may save you time in porting an application, but it won’t do so on the first try.”

But there clearly is a contingent of users and ISVs willing to bet big on Java — and it is a contingent not just composed of companies deploying network computers. Ralston Purina last week rolled out an application that it says taps into Java’s strength as an extremely productive language as well as its cross-platform deployment capabilities.

Sun continues to gain adherents to Java, but critics say that barring the creation of an application that offers capabilities not available from any other language, Sun needs a poster-child application that offers positive proof of Java as a legitimate enterprise-level development environment.

“Right up to this week no one has yet to show they have created an application that is essential to any corporation,” said Mike Drips, a technical consultant for client/server application development at a number of Fortune 1000 accounts. “[Sun] needs one badly to show off at this point.”

Religious battles aside, 1998 should reveal whether Java has real potential as enterprise-class development tool.

Although they probably cannot be called card-carrying Java zealots just yet, Ralston Purina unveiled a Java Development Kit 1.1-based application last week that will play a critical role in automating its manufacturing lines responsible for packaging a wide range of dog- and cat-food products.

Working with a team from IBM, four Java-trained programmers from Ralston completely rewrote the company’s existing PackView application, including the addition of a new interface, in about four months using IBM’s VisualAge for Java.

PackView, which runs on OS/2 servers hosting DB2/2 and on both OS/2 and Windows NT clients, allows operators to view schedules, automatically sets up packing-room line equipment, monitors line-product status, and inputs product information for production lines from Ralston’s manufacturing floor around the clock.

Ralston’s decision to rewrite the application was driven largely by its need to more efficiently produce its rapidly expanding product line. In a market slow to adopt state-of-the-art technology because of traditional low margins and a low tolerance for strategic error, company officials were betting that Java would give them a reasonably priced technology boost over its long-time competitors.

Ralston is pleased with what it has been able to accomplish in a relatively short period of time, said Mary Patterson, director of manufacturing execution systems at Ralston Purina Pet Products.

“After some design work in August, we really only started coding in September. We should finish it in the next week or so,” Patterson said.

The new application, which will be deployed in early January, will save Ralston the significant expense of having to maintain two code bases on two different operating system platforms along with the associated deployment, coordination, and support costs, Patterson contends.

Although everyone generally is pleased with the project, there are no ambitious Java-based projects in the short term. Nonetheless, the company is exploring enhancing some of the communications pieces that connect its MQSeries middleware with its AS/400 midrange systems.