Java in jeopardy?

Sun microsystems marched forward with Java last week at JavaOne, detailing a string of Java enhancements to enthusiastic developers, but conflicts among industry titans renewed questions as to whether Sun can deliver on its grand plans. Despite a barrage of API and product deliveries, Hewlett-Packard’s decision to create its own virtual machine for embedded Java and to license it to Microsoft loomed large at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

Opinion was mixed as to whether this split will jeopardize Sun’s “write once, run anywhere” promise and whether the prospect of multiple Javas will splinter or grow the Java market.

“If you take a mature view of Java — not the religious belief in something that has never been shown to work — HP’s [product] is very good for the language. It might be considered the turning point — meaning that Java is going to be a force,” said Dan Bricklin, president at Trellix, a start-up in Waltham, Mass. “HP is bringing a complete implementation for something very useful without the baggage of trying to fight Microsoft.”

Java licensees were quick to point out that HP’s decision to break with JavaSoft only affects Java for embedded devices.

“The HP [announcement] is a relatively minor situation; it’s for specific product categories. Java has such enormous implications and widespread interest that another Java won’t fragment the industry,” said Jim Barksdale, president of Netscape Communications, in Mountain View, Calif.

Other ISVs saw the discord differently.

“The bottom line is it’s a shame for the development community and the growth of the information technology industry in general. I think if there were common standards, we could move ahead even faster,” said David Isaacson, product marketing manager at Bluestone Software, in Mount Laurel, N.J.

Some corporate developers said HP and Microsoft are increasing their choices.

“If there was no Microsoft there would be no Java. What HP has done is good for the industry,” said Raymond Lee, developer for Singapore Technologies, a defense contractor in Singapore. “It is the way the industry finds the best technology and standardizes on it.”

Despite not having seen HP’s product, Sun officials did not seem to be in a panic over HP’s move. In fact, if the product it is strictly compatible with Sun’s specification it could help spread Java’s reach in the market.

“I want to see lots of implementations of Java as long as they are not incompatible,” said Jim Mitchell, JavaSoft’s vice president of technology, in Mountain View, Calif.

With a showing at JavaOne of 14,000 developers with palpable enthusiasm for Java, Sun’s top brass were happy to celebrate the industry built around Java.

“I love to read about how Java momentum is waning and fracturing,” said Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, at JavaOne. “I can’t imagine a technology that has been more underhyped. Even the judge [in the ongoing Microsoft Java case] got into the act yesterday and made a JavaOne announcement. If momentum is slowing, hurt me with that slowdown.”

But HP’s decision to break with Sun in the embedded Java market underscored the difficulty Sun has had in maintaining both a tight technical standard and a multi-vendor consortium that gives Sun ultimate “decision-making” power.

“Our idea is for embedded Java. You embed a chip in any number of devices and they are Java-enabled. If that’s going to work, it’s got to be an open standard and we became concerned that wasn’t happening,” said Bill Murphy, vice president at HP, in Palo Alto, Calif.

Murphy said HP’s shareholders would be concerned if it relied on just one company for an important technology, particularly if that company was a major competitor. Murphy said such a strategy is simply “untenable.”

Moreover, Hewlett-Packard balked at the idea of not participating in originally defining the specification and the requirement to turn over technical enhancements — its intellectual property — back to Sun, said William Woo, director of engineering for HP’s virtual machine that meets the embedded Java specification.

Alan Baratz, president of Sun’s JavaSoft division said he had offered to waive the licensing fee for the embedded Java virtual machine. To HP, however, which has forged ahead with its own product, this prospect comes too late.

“[Waiving the licensing fee is] being posed as a question only now and it was a question, not an offer. If we were asked only a year ago, it would have been totally different,” HP’s Woo said.

However, apart from its high-profile tangles with HP and Microsoft in court, Sun faces ongoing challenges from its licensees. One top Oracle official noted that the Java licensing could become a sticking point with Oracle if Sun, under pressure to boost JavaSoft revenues, increased the fee.

“JavaSoft should have focused on keeping the virtual machine really tight and well focused,” said Annrai O’Toole, chief technology officer at CORBA middleware vendor Iona Technologies, in Dublin, Ireland. “But their strategy of trying to conquer the whole world and put everything into the virtual machine is not paying dividends.”

For its part, JavaSoft sought to address these issues last week by filling out a large portion of its proposed API delivery plan and vowing to focus in on compatibility and performance. However, JavaSoft’s HotSpot compiler, which is aimed at matching Java performance with other compiled languages, will not ship until this fall with a new Java virtual machine.

With the completion of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification, much of third-party JavaOne announcements focused on server-side Java — notably IBM. Big Blue announced its own implementation of the EJB specification along with Jcentral, which IBM is billing as the largest single developer resource on the Web.

“The key announcements for us are Jcentral and EJB specs. EJB is all about server-side Java, which is particularly important to us because that is where you are going to make money,” said David Gee, IBM’s program director for Java marketing, in Mountain View, Calif.

Besides its own EJB specification, which Baratz compared favorably to Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) architecture, Sun also showed off the Java tools for corporate developers, including the JavaBlend database access product, and a modeling and code generation tool dubbed Java Modeler. The Java Server is a protocol-independent server that can handle Internet protocol, FTP, IMP, and HTTP.

JavaSoft also announced at JavaOne last week that it will port PersonalJava to Microsoft’s Windows CE. The company also laid out a road map for its upcoming Java Development Kit 1.2, currently in its third beta release. That road map includes details about performance improvements as well as a complete Java API update.

During his keynote, Baratz engaged in some predictable Microsoft bashing. Comparing Sun’s EJB with Microsoft’s COM, he said one of the outstanding differences between the companies’ approaches is that, “Microsoft creates a product and promises a specification, but never delivers on that promise. Whatever happened to ActiveX as a standard?” Baratz asked.

Baratz and other officials said the numerous Java enhancements mark a turning point for the technology and JavaSoft.

“We are undergoing a change of focus,” Baratz said. “In the past we have been focused on the breath of the specification. Now, we need to address performance, compatibility, and stability.”

Stannie Holt, Katherine Bull, and Niall McKay of InfoWorld contributed to this article.