day 19

the java cup is half full 1: the fame game

Someone has to do it. It is long overdue. For far too long now the Java cup has been overflowing with undeserved press attention and industry hype. It is time for someone to slap some sense back into the heads of the mesmerized public. It is reality-check time. And the SpinDoc is the right person to do it. The plain truth: the Java cup is only half full. If you are among the few habitants of the planet that has not heard, Java is a C++ derivative language, interpreter, and object-oriented framework cobbled together by Sun Microsystem's James Gosling. James developed Java while puttering around in the back room of SunLabs. Not knowing what to do with the results of a failed attempt at making video on demand work for the slow-witted systems at Sun, Gosling tripped over the opportunity to salvage his work by adapting it to the Internet. Gosling may not be quite as lucky as Bill Gates, but his big break occurred when a little company down the freeway adopted Java as its scripting language for a browser called Navigator. Swept into the limelight by the outrageously successful public stock offering of Netscape Communications Inc., Java, Sun, and Gosling were suddenly sucked into the star-making machinery of FAME. Java cleans up unruly pointers and some inconsistencies in C++, adds an object-oriented application framework for handling events in GUI browsers, and compiles down to a byte code stream that is interpreted on a virtual byte-code machine, instead of a real machine. The most important thing about Java is that it is interpreted, and, therefore, it can run on any machine. When combined with Netscape Navigator, Java applets become platform-independent and portable programs that can run on anything. In fact, combining HTTP/HTML-based browsers with any interpretive language such as Java results in a replacement platform for other platforms, e.g. Windows, MacOS, and Unix. Operating systems are irrelevant to such applications. Java solves the Tower of Babel problem created by an industry that has long used different languages, different operating systems, and different processors as a weapon of destruction in the computer wars. Effective up until now, this diversity has held back computing for 50 years. Java means that application developers no longer need to divide into camps - Windows, Unix, and MacOS. A single universal language promises to meld the different developer camps into one unified developer community. If you want to find out the real truth about Java and friends, read this week's Daily Dose. I think you will be in for a surprise. On the other hand, if you want to believe the confetti spewing out of Sun's new JavaSoft division, skip to the Java home page at java.sun.com.

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