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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: JavaOne 1997: JavaOne 1998: 6,000 10,0000 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.

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[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:

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- 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:

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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

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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 ---200-400 MHz CPU 16-64 MB RAM 1-4 GB Disk 2005 ---3-6,000 MHz CPU 256-1024 MB RAM 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.

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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. ______________________________________________________________________

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