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Sun Goal: 10 Million Java Developers
New branding initiatives, Project Rave, and Project Relator are designed to expand the base of Java developers and bring visual development to the Java platform.
by Dan Ruby
JavaOne, June 11, 2003
Answering questions about Java's relative maturity, Sun used JavaOne to roll out a series of initiatives designed to inject new life into the decade-old language, platform, and community. The moves focused on increasing the developer base with improved ease of development, enhanced support for Web services, mobile initiatives to take advantage of Java's ubiquity, and marketing and community efforts to raise Java's profile as a technology brand.
"All of the efforts of the community demonstrate that Java has greater vitality, health, and momentum than ever," said Rich Green, Sun vice president of Java development, in his second-day keynote address.
He measured that vitality by stating that the ratio of lines of Java code written by independent and third-party developers to lines of code written by Sun platform developers is greater than ever before. Now Sun aims to boost the vitality index further with initiatives designed to increase the base of Java developers from its current 3 million to a goal of 10 million developers within two years.
The company's many announcements this week are designed to fuel that growth. New programs for "Java-powered" branding, application compatibility verification, the java.com online consumer channel, and the java.net online developer community were launched to raise Java's profile as a technology brand.
A series of mobility initiatives (see "Sun Lowers Bar for J2ME Developers") focuses on taking advantage of the more than 100 million Java-powered devices in use by consumers and businesses. New distribution deals with Hewlett-Packard and Dell ensure that Java will be ubiquitous on desktop Windows systems as well as on an amazing variety of computing systems, mobile devices, and embedded systems.
Delivery of a second beta release of J2EE 1.4 highlighted a series of moves that solidified Java's place as the premier platform for Web services development. The final release of the latest Java enterprise platform awaits the finalization of the Web Services Basic Profile by the Web Services Interoperability organization (WS-I), expected later this year.
"The fusion of Java and Web services will kick off a new round of innovation comparable to what we saw from J2EE itself," said Mark Bauhaus, Sun vice president of Java Web Services. "Until now, every vendor has had to do its own implementation of the core Web services standards, which meant that developers could not be sure that their applications would run across all servers. With J2EE 1.4, compatibility will be assured."
The most direct part of the campaign to expand the base of Java developers centered on new technologies and future tools to enable application development by less-skilled corporate developers, application integrators, and mobile application developers, which Green identified as the sectors where the next wave of Java developers would come from.
"There is an enormous opportunity in focusing on ease of development for people who are more oriented to assembling applications than in coding them from scratch," he said.
Sun unveiled new technologies for J2EE visual development, J2ME content development, and scripting language integration. Targeting corporate application developers with a visual environment that minimizes complexity and speeds time to market, Sun showed off its new Project Rave in a demonstration of building a corporate Web application connecting to a back-end database and external Web service. The demo highlighted drag-and-drop layout of user interfaces and component infrastructures, simplified the event-based coding model based on JavaServer Faces, simplified access to JDBC databases, simplified access to Web services, and reduced code complexity resulting from upcoming metadata features of the Java platform technology.
Project Rave will be available in an early-access beta program in the fall, with a first customer release in mid- to late 2004. The first release will target data-driven Web applications, with future enhancements planned to enable rich client applications and full transactional enterprise systems.
Sun also showed off its Project Relator, a collaboration tool for GUI designers and J2ME technology programmers that allows J2ME content developers to attach Java business logic to user interface designs built with a standard graphical design tool. A first release of Project Relator is expected in mid-2004.
In another move to embrace Web application developers, Sun announced JSR 223 to fully support scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, and Python in the Java platform. JSR 223 will create a standard method for accessing Java-based systems from within Web applications not based on Java technology.
About the Author
Dan Ruby is editorial director of Java Pro.
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