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Sun's Future Goals Regarding Tools, Microsoft and Research Gosling Shares His Thoughts
Deemed the father of JavaTM programming language, Dr. James Gosling spoke with Janice J. Heiss recently about his work as Chief Technology Officer of Sun's Developer Products group, his views on the Sun-Microsoft Agreement and his current research project entitled Jackpot. Gosling said his goal in working with Sun tools is to make them the most advanced and interesting for the majority of developers. He identified two major directions that Java tools need to take in the future: ease of development and high-end sophisticated tools for large-scale enterprise applications. "For quite a while, Java technology developers have been able to build extremely sophisticated applications, but the straight forward stuff was often more complex than it needed to be, especially when compared with Microsoft's Visual Studio, where people could slap together something rather quickly," Gosling said. On the other hand, Gosling noted that Microsoft's solutions had difficulties with enterprise-size applications, and now with the companies working together, he pointed out that "tools are where we have the most to do vis-a-vis Microsoft." Regarding the realigned relationship with Microsoft, Gosling reassured Sun loyalists that the Java technology strategy has not changed. And although the Sun-Microsoft settlement involved the Microsoft's Communications Protocol Program, Gosling stated that it in no way obligates anyone into interoperability. "This in no way locks Sun or Sun customers into interoperating with any Microsoft system on Microsoft's strict terms," he confirmed. "Right now, most of our interoperability is achieved through reverse engineering. We have the option, entirely at our discretion, to access Microsoft's specifications through the collaboration agreement. But before we do so, on a case-by-case basis, we will analyze the business case and the entanglements that such access implies, which are principally confidentiality and royalties." Clarifying that a majority of Sun software comes with free and open specifications, he confirmed that the company will continue to remain actively involved in the open source community irrespective of the Microsoft relationship. "We have thus far launched no projects that will access any Microsoft specifications under the agreement -- we simply have the option to, if we decide that the benefits outweigh the costs," Gosling said. "Concluding the Microsoft lawsuit was good for Sun, good for the industry, and good for the Java technology community. As I've said, we have not sold our soul." The eternal research pioneer, Gosling continues to explore methods to ease programming and has been focusing much of his time on his current research project, Jackpot. Based on manipulating programs as semantic models instead of text, parts of Jackpot are incorporated within the NetBeansTM 4.0 release.
"Bits and pieces of Jackpot are finding their way into products," he
said. "As time passes, more and more of the things we learned there
will show up in NetBeans."
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Sun's Future Goals Regarding Tools, Microsoft and Research
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