Sun pushes Java’s performance, browser independence

Tokyo (02/04/98) — Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Java platform is expanding from its desktop success into a multiplicity of consumer devices, and several forthcoming products from Sun will speed that movement, one of the company’s top technologists said at the Net + Com show in Tokyo.

With 70 million PCs now using Java technology, the platform already has succeeded on the desktop, said Jim Mitchell, vice president of architecture and technology at Sun and a Sun Fellow. Now is the time for Java to move into cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and a range of embedded applications, said Mitchell.

“It’s early days for Java in that market, but Java is doing very well,” he added. Mitchell pointed to the market’s potential, quoting figures that predict a growth in the market for embedded systems — from 03 million this year to 85 million in 2000.

The keynote speech Mitchell delivered here, titled “Japan is on the Road to Java,” is part of a growing push by Sun to entice Japanese hardware, industrial, and consumer electronics vendors to integrate Java technologies into their systems.

Mitchell drew attention to Sun’s Java Activator, an upcoming product from the company. When downloaded, Activator can detect which version of the Java interpreter — the Java virtual machine (JVM) — is running on a client and offers users the option of downloading the latest version of the JVM from Sun.

The product, which was announced in December of last year and will be included in Sun’s JumpStart package shipping in March, erases the need for Java to be bundled into World Wide Web browsers, Mitchell said. Even if Sun’s rival Microsoft Corp. bundles its own version of the Java interpreter, users will be able to download the most up-to-date JVM from Sun, he said.

“We are no longer dependent on having the Java virtual machine included in the browser,” said Mitchell.

Activator is part of Sun’s efforts to raise the performance of Java while increasing its stability and lowering the time to market for Java products.

In Asia, Sun will ship localized versions of the company’s Java Developer Kit (JDK) 1.1.6 in “any Asian language,” Mitchell said. In Japan, Sun’s JDK 1.2, which will ship later this year, will include anti-aliased fonts for displaying kanji characters more clearly.

Mitchell cited other figures as proof of the success Java has achieved since the technology began to take off three years ago:

• 2 million downloads of JDK
• 700,000 Java developers
• 140 Java licensees
• 30,000 Web pages written in Java vs. 1,000 Web pages created using Microsoft Corp.’s ActiveX technology
• 10,000 attendees at Sun’s JavaOne conference in 1997 in San Francisco vs. 6,200 attendees at Microsoft’s developers conference last year.