Roundtable Transcript, Part 2 (Continued)

Manageability, Serviceability, and Rich Clients
[17:10] Phipps: So, any other votes?

[17:13] Jeff Cobb: Yeah, I've got a vote. Full disclosure. I'm a management guy. We're a management company. My answer is, manageability and serviceabilityare what's going to grow the marketplace. The battleground is moving from piling on features to making them usable, allowing the systems to live longer. Dynamic provisioning, just the sort of, the perpetual uptime goal that everybody wants in these systems. To get there you must talk to the systems about what they're doing instead of just making them do things. And there's a lot of new functionality in 1.5, the stuff that's in 163, the stuff that's in 174 that's aimed specifically at that goal. I think that's one big direction that's it's good to finally see the Java platform mature in respect to that.

[18:03] Elloy: Particularly with SOA.

[18:05] Cobb: Right. It's sort of a necessary precondition to the SOA stuff really being able to get a ton of traction.

[18:12] Steve Stover: To bring us around a little bit to tie in a couple of .NET and Eclipse issues, from my perspective, I don't know that over, say, the next year, interoperability between .NET and Java is the big thing. It will be, but where we are in terms of .NET and the types of environments for J2EE, I think you have to be more concerned about managing heterogeneous environments than building applications in heterogeneous environments with native .NET and J2EE. So while we will get there, I still think we'll be extracted by some level of a Web service or a service bus or something like that. But one thing that's very intriguing to me will be over to next year to see the movement of Eclipse 3.0 as a general-purpose, rich-client platform. Because we tried this once…

[19:02] Milinkovich: I didn't pay him, I promise.

[19:05] Stover: Well, we tried this once in Java, and we all know the challenges, but the world has changed a little bit where another open source initiative like Linux might actually help us out with getting more Java on the desktop. So from my perspective in terms of things like open source, Eclipse, SWT, and how it all affects the standards process, the next year is going to be very interesting because we're going to learn some things. About one is what's going to be the acceptance level of rich clients because for me, while three-tiered computing is great, I've always hated Web interfaces for complex applications; it drove me nuts. Loved the deployment savings, that's fabulous; loved the maintenance savings. But the richness of that end-user experience, I'm still not getting in my Web application. I'm having a hard time seeing that at least from my perspective, from the people that I speak to wanting to build those types of applications, because right now, with Microsoft, applications traditionally have been client/server with VB and then people move into smaller departmental applications with ASP and related technologies.

[20:16] Chappell: I would add that I don't think anybody wants to build those kinds of environments. I think it's more of a case that people have that thrust on…

[20:24] Stover: Well, there are those cases in M&A, but how do corporate developers, the broadest majority of corporate developers deal with that? I don't think the answer to that is yes. I think there is a significant population of those that do.

[20:37] Chappell: I don't think it's just M&A. Almost all corporate developers today have this environment of applications and the desire within IT to take advantage of existing investments in applications that are already there. And most of them are developed in neither J2EE nor .NET.