Programming language set to forge ahead

Ed Zander, president and chief operating officer of Sun, insisted that Java is now a reality when he kicked off the company's Java Enterprise Solutions Symposium last week.

Zander said: 'In 1995, we bet that three technologies would change the way we use IT around the millennium - the internet, Java and bandwidth.

www is now the new area code of the world and the internet is profoundly changing the way we conduct business. Next month, Java will be four years old and no other technology has grown so quickly and had such an impact.'

He predicted that the number of Java programmers will triple by 2002 and outnumber C++ programmers. 'Java is a reality now. It's no longer a Sun product anymore - the investment other companies are making in Java far exceeds Sun's,' he said.

Frank Pinto, worldwide vice president of sales at Sun, commented: 'There are around one million Java programmers in the world and they can't be wrong. There are nearly 1,000 universities offering courses in Java and 1,200 books on programming Java. Java will be the cornerstone of our future commercial success.'

In a separate keynote speech, Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer at Sun, predicted that the network computer of the future will be a Web phone. He added that voice and data networks will converge and users will pay for access to a network, but phone calls will be available from that network for free.