JavaOne 1998 - Java on the March
by Bill Petro
o Summary
As Java technology "crosses the chasm" from early adopters to the volume
market, we see the maturing of the platform and diversity of
solution-oriented product offerings. As Java develops as a platform, server
side Java makes a big presence as 15 different companies are selling
products and services worth over $150 million a year. A larger percentage
of business people, not just developers attended this year's event. The
potential for personal, embedded, and smart card applications of Java put
it in the billions of units, not just the 10's of millions for PC volumes.
This article covers a few of the keynotes and breakout sessions in detail,
and other distinctives at JavaOne.
o Contents:
Introduction
Factoids
Other Keynotes
Exhibitors
Announcements
Breakout Sessions
JMAPI and JavaSpaces
The Java Ring - Knuckle-top computing
Scott McNealy interviewed by Children
Java Technology Town
Final Keynotes
Crossing the Chasm to the Gorilla Game
o Introduction:
John Gage of Sun's Science Office emceed the 4 day, 5,000 minute event. He
led this huge developer conference, the largest of its kind. As most large
meetings are motivational, this one was like a camp meeting revival. There
was tremendous energy and momentum.
Attendance:
JavaOne 1996: 6,000
JavaOne 1997: 10,0000
JavaOne 1998: 14,000
John asked the attendees to collect 10 business cards daily. This became a
virtual mating ritual, as it were, of new business associations. Although
there are more "suits" this year than in the first two years, there were
still more "T-shirts" by a ratio of one or two orders of magnitude. The
conference was geared more toward the engineering "T-shirts." Of the 7
different breakout tracks, 4 were technical tracks. Twice the number of
sessions were offered over last year with 130 of them, some repeated. There
were over 75 Birds Of a Feather (BOFs) offered and 275 exhibitors.
o Factoids:
Alan Baratz, the President of the JavaSoft division of Sun provided these
factoids. There are now:
70,000,000 Java seats
700,000 Java developers
1,000+ shipping Java technology apps
138+ Java licenses
43% of Enterprises are using the Java Platform
56% of companies are using Mission Critical Java apps
The man credited with the creation of Java, if any one person can claim
that honor, is James Gosling. The following came from his keynote.
As of the present, there have been:
2,000,000 JDK downloads
300,000 Java Developer Connection subscribers
130,000 Java Bean Developer Kit downloads
75,000 Java Foundation Class downloads
80% of Java development is for creating cross-platform apps.
More developers are creating things in Java for the Internet than in C and
C++ combined. James believes that this is the year that the performance
problem goes away for Java. Today's Just In Time compilers (JITs) are
getting close to compiled C speeds, especially JITs like Symantec's 3.0.
[The Java Developer Kit 1.1.6 is four times faster than JDK 1.1.] The
much-anticipated HotSpot dynamic performance enhancement technology will
deliver dramatically faster synchronization and behavior-driven dynamic
compilation. By collecting statistics, and watching program and data going
through algorithms, it will be better than static compilers.
o Other Keynotes
Ed Zander:
Sun's Chief Operating Officer seeing the Java enthusiasm said that it
rivals the excitement of mini-computers in the early 70's and PCs in the
late 70's. "It's like Woodstock." He pointed out that all development at
Sun is done in Java. Of the 300 main applications that Sun uses daily, 60
so far have been converted to Java. For the future, he sees the following
trends:
Trend #1: The Network is the Company. Increasingly, the network will be the
center of where the company thinks.
Trend #2: The network will distribute the applications. And Java technology
will be part of that.
Trend #3: It's not just thin today, it's going to be thin tomorrow. Not
just thin clients, but thin phones, thin smartcards, thin everything.
Trend #4: Server consolidation. Companies will be doing this to save money.
Trend #5: Java technology is now blurring the lines. Specifically, the
lines between the consumer space, the telecommunications space, and the
computer space are now blurring.
Scott McNealy:
Sun's CEO opened with the requisite "Top 10 List" and later gave the group
his Hopes, Tips, and Suggestions:
For the equipment manufacturers: if there is a network on your equipment,
put a Java virtual machine in it. If it has a CPU in it, put Java
technology on the CPU. And incorporate a smart chip reader so that Java
Chips can be read.
For application and content developers: Java technology is now the default.
At Sun, two years ago this August, we decided that the default was Java
technology and it certainly hasn't hurt us or slowed us down. When you
develop code, test for 100% purity. Send your applications to Key Labs over
the Net and get them tested.
Finally to the information manager: you ought to rewrite your IT
architectures. Your IT architecture ought to read: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML,
ASCII, Java SQL, IIOP and CORBA. Don't do Windows, COM, DCOM, Office,
"CaptiveX," or DMA. Don't deploy any Java applications on your network that
do not have the 100% Pure Java coffee cup logo on it. Assume the large
server, thin client, and thin-pipe (slow telephone lines) architecture.
During Scott's talk, he demonstrated the Sun.Net application, which is
being used inside Sun now, and will be made available as a product to
customers later. This allows any employee with an Enigma token card (credit
card, calculator type security device) to access the Sun Wide Area Network
(SWAN, Sun's internal network) securely from any Java-powered network
connected browser in the world. I personally have been using it for months
and it's phenomenal. Via Java-based applets, a user can get access to their
mail, calendar, name tool, and internal Sun Web pages.
o Exhibitors:
We saw different kinds of exhibitors this year than in years past.
Previously there were lots of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
and tools for Java development. This year there were more of them, plus a
number of Web-based learning environments (DigitalThink, MindQ), Java-based
Independent Hardware Vendors (Toshiba, Dallas Semiconductor), and even a
Java- based Internet-playable game. The number of companies offering
object-oriented Java-based supply chain management and electronic commerce
has flourished. There was more support and announcements for Enterprise
Java Beans than you can imagine.
o Announcements:
Announcements at JavaOne were too numerous to mention, but two specifically
were of great interest to the developers:
- Java JumpStart CD: JVMs for your installed machines plus Java Activator,
a replacement for substandard, non-compatible Java browser environments
plus one-stop Sun support and skills analysis.
- Open Tool Suite: A collection of enterprise developer tools that can work
with the Java Workshop IDE and provide additional functionality for
application modeling, a repository for group work, and capability to allow
you to build applications to access relational database via an
object-oriented model.
- Enterprise Java Beans: The announcement of the 1.0 specification and
announced support from major vendors for Enterprise Java Beans suggest that
Java is ready for prime time, especially for industrial-strength,
business-ready applications. Products from IBM, Netscape, Oracle, Symantec
and others will place EJBs in important tool, middleware, and server
locations.
o Breakout sessions
The session that I found to be the most thought provoking was by Lew
Tucker, Director of Strategic Relations in JavaSoft. His talk on the "Java
Revolution: Year 3" reviewed where Java has come since the tumbling Duke
animation of Web pages. He quoted Tim Berners-Lee, one of the fathers of
the World Wide Web who said, "In politics, revolutions counteract each
other. In technology they build upon each other."
Lew reviewed the technology hype cycle from the trigger, up to the Peak of
Inflated Expectations, down to the Trough of Disillusionment, as it moves
slowly upward on the Slope of Enlightenment to the actual Plateau of
Productivity. Year 1 was the year of the Java Language with Animated Web
pages, the "Hello world" of the computer timeline. Year 2 saw the year of
the Java Platform, where Java created and deployed real world applications
like business applications and Internet services. Year 3 and beyond sees
the Java Industry where embedded functions and "under the hood"
applications make Java ubiquitous. This is when servers, executable
content, agents, and devices are all tied together.
In "crossing the chasm" from early adopters to mainstream pragmatics,
momentum is important. Lew pointed out that according to Forrester, 42% of
IT executives say that Java technology will be part of their strategy and
that 81% will use Java technology for mission critical applications within
2 years. Server-side Java technology development is 14% today and expected
to grow to 74% by 1999. IDC reports that in the US and Canada, in July of
1997 there was a 35% adoption of Java technology, but just 3 months later
in October, there was a 46% adoption rate. Zona Research reports that the
growth of budget allocated for Java-related activities will grow from 12.7%
in the next 6 months to 21% over the next 24 months.
And why is Java technology succeeding so much? Lew attributes it to
business processes that are changing faster than ever. IT organizations are
struggling to keep pace with changing mission statements, mergers &
acquisitions, process re-engineering, and Year 2000 issues. Java technology
saves time and money over C++ across all phases of the development and
production process.
He urged us to look at the following "companies to know," several of whom
were at JavaOne: NetDynamics, Extensity, Ariba, Vision Software, WebLogic,
Sales Vision, Marimba, AlphaBlox, Blue Lobster, Thought, Novera, Infospace,
Cloudscape, Active Software, Art Technology, Randomwalk, Digital Harbor,
and Neoglyphics.
Lew concluded with this quote from Tim Berners-Lee, "So, each revolution
must aim to become the basis for another unknown revolution."
Marshall Gibbs of CSX spoke following Lew, and quoted Tom Peters who said,
"If you're not already embracing Java, you're dead, get out." CSX has 45
Java apps involving 6 million lines of code. They support 10 million
transactions a day for $1 billion revenue. All their new development is in
Java.
o JMAPI and JavaSpaces
I did get a chance to visit a couple of the technical break out sessions. I
was keen to learn about the progress of the Java Management API (JMAPI), a
Java-based architecture allowing system management companies to plug into a
common infrastructure. The new JavaSpaces talk was also of interest to me,
as it was the technology that the Java Ring demo used. It is a simple
service for cooperative computing, an object repository that has
persistence, template-matching lookup and multi-space transactions. It
stores entries (tuples of objects) in an RMI-based (Java Remote Method
Invocation), concurrent environment. The service has four simple operators:
Write: put an entry into a space
Read: return a match
Takes: removes a match (consumptive)
Notify: send an event when matched
A simple example would be an animator who needs to render frames for a
movie. He "writes" requests for rendering entries into a JavaSpace (see
below) and then "takes" results that are written back. A server processes
the tasks by taking generic "do a task" entries and executing each task and
writing back the results.
This technology works well for cooperative, loosely coupled systems and
scales well. Possible uses include workflow applications (1. Expense
report, 2. Signed, 3. Approved, 4. Paid), group ware applications (version
control, edit, token, entry, token list), trading systems (commodity bids,
where prices are entries in the JavaSpace), or information publishing that
use simple lookup mechanisms.
o The Java Ring - Knuckle-top computing
At a previous JavaOne, John Gage envisioned a small Java device that
attendees would receive. This year, it came true. Each attendee received a
Java Ring with a JavaCard-compliant iButton processor developed by Dallas
Semiconductor (www.ibutton.com) that had two Java applets preloaded. The
first applet could be customized with one's registration information and
Java (coffee) preference. Mine was decaffeinated mocha coffee. One could
then go to the Hackers Lounge, plug the ring into the "blue dot" ring
reader and have a computer interface to a coffee machine and get your
preferred cup.
The second applet calculated a 3x3 pixel in an 80,000-pixel fractal image
that was generated via a JavaSpace environment that took advantage of the
14,000 intermittently connected Java Ring parallel processors. "The
Conference is the Computer."
The applications one could use this for are as wide as one's imagination.
With credit card "readers" (swipers) costing $50-100, and "blue dot" ring
readers costing only around $2, in volume the number of applications could
be huge. Currently, (non-Java) iButton applications are used in hospitals
on ID bracelets, in Istanbul, Turkey for mass transit micro-payments, in
Mexico and Moscow for purchasing fuel, in Canada for vending machines, in
China for bus passes, and by the US Postal Service as sentinel clock and
address for the blue curb-side postal boxes.
As a side note, I was recently speaking at a Sun product launch in India
when the country manager said during our Press Briefing that he predicted
by the Year 2000, people would be wearing three computing devices, most
likely powered by Java. I mentioned,
"I'm already wearing three Java-powered computing devices. In my pocket
is a Psion PDA with a Java Virtual Machine which runs demos from the
JDK 1.1. In my wallet is a JavaCard smartcard. 90% of the smartcard
manufacturers have licensed Java. And on my hand is a Java Ring, with a
processor "button" developed by a company in Dallas, Texas. Schlag Lock
Company has developed an application that responds to the processor and
opens a lock. Imagine the uses in identification, ATMs, and security."
o Scott McNealy interviewed by Children
One test of how profound something is involves whether it can be explained
to a child. Scott McNealy was interviewed by a class of grammar school
children and asked a number of questions. Most of them centered around
Java. Here are some of the questions he fielded:
Will computers think?
Why was Java invented?
What is the #1 product that Sun sells?
The StarFire, the Enterprise 10,000
What is the most important thing Sun does?
"For our employees.... pay"
"For our shareholders... money"
"For our customers... product "
What is neat about Java?
He concluded that the thing he most likes about Java, being a former golf
major, is that it makes computing simple.
o Java Technology Town
Last year, Scott showed a closet of Java devices. This year it has grown to
a large room-sized Java Technology Town. It showcased devices in the
following areas: Home Office, Home Living Room, Mobile Computing, Schools,
Hospital, HR Kiosk, and Retail.
I particularly liked the Home Office, as it included Java running on a
Psion 5 palmtop PDA. It showed demos from the JDK 1.1, originally written
on a Sun workstation, now running in the palm of one's hand.
The Living Room, among other things, had a lamp that was controlled via
X-10 technology and a Java Ring reader. Just plug the Java Ring in, and the
light goes on... if your ring has been personalized for that device.
The Mobile Computing area showed off a new Toshiba laptop running the
JavaOS and a Java Webtop application environment.
o Final Keynotes
Thursday's keynote included a panel of speakers including Jim Mitchell of
JavaSoft, Eric Schmidt (formerly CTO of Sun, now CEO of Novel), Billy
Edwards of Motorola, Todd Reece of HP (Merced chip) and Bill Joy,
co-founder of Sun. They addressed the question of what the world would look
like in 2005, ten years after the introduction of Java.
Jim Mitchell outlined this comparison in computers:
1998 2005
---- ----
200-400 MHz CPU 3-6,000 MHz CPU
16-64 MB RAM 256-1024 MB RAM
1-4 GB Disk 16-64 GB Disk
Eric Schmidt asked "How Big will Java Be?"
"Java has won the electronic commerce battle. There are about 100 million
Java Virtual Machines today, roughly the scale of Windows. In 2005 I expect
1 billion. That creates vendor- independent APIs, and on the server-side,
Java is particularly strong."
Todd Reece pointed out that Java technology needs to be cheap and
everywhere. It needs a fast level of innovation but must be balanced by
compatibility. The Coca-Cola Company wants to make sure they have a Coke
within 100 feet of a person. Java needs to be closer.
Bill Joy talked about how Java technology is seeing the emergence of broad
libraries of reusable software components, because the language has safety,
and is object-oriented enough so that these libraries can be built. He
compared this to the emergence of the integrated circuits, and the dual
inline packages, where PC boards are the applications that you can plug in.
He called it a kind of a "Holy Grail" of computing. He further said that he
doesn't think that Java is the last programming language, there may be
another before 2005 that is data driven, or constraint driven, or logic
driven. But when asked, he didn't see Java being replaced by 2005, "because
we've worked on the technology that became Java technology from the
mid-sixties until now," if there was something else coming, "we'd probably
know about it already." Eric Schmidt commented that we still talk about
COBOL (1956) and Fortran (1958).
o "Crossing the Chasm to the Gorilla Game"
The most exciting talk was the final keynote given by Geoffrey Moore,
author of "Crossing the Chasm" (1991), "Inside the Tornado" (1995), and
most recently "The Gorilla Game." His talk, based on his new book, was
entitled "Java Technology, Darwin and the Survival of the Species." I'm
sure he did not chose this title because of Sun's newly announced "Darwin"
line of PCI- based, low-priced, high-performance graphical computers. He
said that, in Darwin's words, Java is a mutation. It has survived the
parental rejection phase and become a new species. It now competes with
other species for scarce resources and is now undergoing natural selection.
Like other new species, it is a "discontinuous innovation," a new entrant
and competes against the vested interests of "continuous innovation."
Java technology is already a successful product. The issue, though, is that
it has a role in many potential markets, potentially hundreds, from highly
consumer-oriented applications to very enterprise-oriented applications.
Each of these markets is developing its own value chain.
Markets are ecosystems and individual markets are value chains. Value
chains are mini-ecosystems where it's company versus company. Value chains
also compete with each other as market versus market. This is where Java
technology competes. An example is Visual Basic versus Java.
He compared technology life cycles to category life cycles, as discussed in
his previous two books, and the emergence of "Gorillas" in either enabling
technologies or the application space. He listed market shares of Cisco
(75-85%), HP printers (75%), and Microsoft (95%). Other examples would
include SAP in the Enterprise applications area and Oracle in the database
area. It is not just end users that select the Gorilla and determine market
share, but partners, venders, service providers, and suppliers. It is not
always the best technology that wins. For Java to win, the Java value
chains must get out of the "chasm." This is the responsibility of
developers, not JavaSoft.
To get out of the "chasm," it's much faster if you focus on a market before
you focus on a mass market. To win in a niche market you have to seek out a
customer in pain -- a broken, mission critical process - a herd-following,
volume-buying, main street Pragmatist in pain. Then put together a complete
solution (not a technology), partner to pull all the pieces together into a
plan, and then grow onward to adjacent markets. Java is ready, if it can
get through the Tornado of hyper-growth. [Now you'll have to read the book :-]
Lest the reader feel that JavaOne has slipped by, the keynotes and sessions
can be found at http://java.sun.com/javaone. There are slides, transcripts,
and in some case audio and RealAudio versions. And besides, there's
always next year in San Francisco.
______________________________________________________________________