Roundtable Transcript, Part 2 (Continued)

Java Management and Interoperability
[00:27] Simon Phipps: The discussion so far has been very good. I would like, if we can, to move a little more into the sort of features we've been talking of—we've been talking a little bit about open source—to carry on from that point of talking about open source and go more into the directions that Java is taking or the directions we feel Java should be taking. So, for example, I would be interested to know exactly which features of J2SE 1.5 you think are most likely to grow the Java marketplace over the next couple of years. I'd be interested to know how you feel about the growth of client development, in particular, what the role of things like JDNC or any of the desktop JSRs. What you feel is the potential for the growth of use of EJB 3.0 of the future. And any other topics that are related to the direction that Java is now heading in. What do you think are the features that are missing that maybe your company wants to sponsor? And you're welcome to leave your credit card at the door, and I'll make sure to [run that through] before you leave. [Laughter]

I'd be very interested to find out what features of J2SE 1.5 you think are actually crucial, and what features of the latest rev of J2EE you think are crucial. And if you don't want to answer that question, then answer some other question about the direction Java's taking. Again, as is traditional, I'll always ask Dave first, as well as wait for you to come back. So to Dave, what do you think are the most important features of J2SE 1.5 or the current round of J2EE for the growth of the Java market?

[02:31] David Chappell: Well, one of the things that was exciting that was talked about this morning, in fact, in the general session, was the notion of JMX management APIs. I'm a big proponent of JMX as a means for managing things, for configuring things, for facilitating remote deployments, and so forth. Now, beyond J2SE I think is more in the realm of J2EE and beyond is the future of integration and where Java's headed with that.

There's a part of the Java Community Process, an effort called the Java Business Integration, which marks an interesting direction for Java, and for enterprise Java, in particular, in that it's an effort for enterprise Java that's not necessarily contained within the umbrella of the official J2EE platform because actually one of the charters of the group is to be able to foster an ecosystem of integration components that extends beyond the typical handful of app server vendors in the J2EE space. Now, what Java Business Integration is about is creating standard interfaces for pluggable integration components that can fit into and enable these event-driven, service-oriented architectures that we spent the last hour talking about.

[04:42] Phipps: So who are the participants in that activity?

[04:44] Chappell: There's a number of us here are involved. Sonic Software's been involved since the beginning. BEA's involved, IBM's involved.

[04:54] Boz Elloy: SAP's involved.

[04:56] Chappell: SAP's involved. That's right. And it's exciting. I think it really will help enable to standardize a missing piece of SOA that was needed.

[05:19] Phipps: Anyone else want to vote for that as the most important part of Java for going forward?

[05:30] Elloy: I'll take a crack.

[05:31] Phipps: You will, okay. So Boz's turn.

[05:32] Elloy: Slightly contrary, and probably I'm going to get thrown out for saying this, but I think it's an inevitability that one thing Java has to get good at is interoperability with the .NET framework. Because if you look at the economic buyers of technology, they know that .NET, its capabilities, are for client-side, UI-rich applications, right, and very easy to develop, very highly interoperable with everything else on the desktop. And their understanding is that J2EE's for the industrial-strength back end. So I think with the current push of Java onto the client, which is a natural thing to do, the adoption rate is going to be curtailed by the rapid adoption of .NET. So I think that's something that's going to become increasingly more important. A lot of our customers are by definition using tools that need to work together, technologies that need to work together, and there's not a lot of them out there right now.

[06:27] Phipps: So are you saying that because you have a product or do you think that's because there's a wider demand? I mean is this a demand that other vendors are seeing the need for and supporting?

[06:38] Elloy: If you look at everything that, I mean I don't know how much credence you put in what the industry analysts say, but if you look at what all the top industry analysts are saying, upwards of 85 percent of the G2K companies globally do have heterogeneous environments, and they want to leverage the right technology for the right platform, and .NET dominates the desktop.

[06:59] Benjamin Renaud: I'll agree with that. I think that, obviously, that's the nature of large organizations—very heterogeneous; smaller organizations will have a lot of .NET in them. How we work better with .NET is clearly something that we should all be thinking about. Going back to your question, however, specifically to J2SE 1.5.

A somewhat different topic, but your original question is, what is the most important thing here…I'll make the argument that JSR 175, which is the metadata facility for J2SE, is the most significant development in this edition, and the reason is because it's a very generic way of adding declarative features to Java. In fact, to tie it back to the point that Boz just made, it might be a good way to actually help interoperability with .NET for the long term by specifying certain properties of your code and how to interact with the rest of the environment. But in general, as in a facility to add ease of use to J2SE, JSR 175 provides the base infrastructure that is going to be critical. So going back to the main theme I think we should be looking at that in the Java community. I think SOA for sure, ease of use, absolutely, and 175 helps that.

[08:25] Phipps: Do you think ease of use is about having built the tools or about having language features?

[08:32] Renaud: It's about a combination of tools, language features, and abstractions.

[08:38] Phipps: If anyone else wants their crib notes on J2SE 1.5, it's on page 19 of the magazine [Java Pro] in front of you. [Laughter]

[08:45] Jeff Jackson: I have to say that not necessarily voting for the most important, but my personal favorite I agree is under JMX and the management space. Just to have that in there and be able to use it is my personal favorite. On the interoperability I think that's probably going to be the most important going forward and how we go about that is going to be interesting, as a group.