Java Fiends

Java is more than a storm in a teacup, it?s the shape of things to come if the big boys in the industry are to be believed. Mike Magee reports

It?s probably as hard for most people to get their heads round the Java programming language as it is for them to understand Gamelan Indonesian music, especially now when the loud notes emanating from vendors seem to drown out the essential point of the software, which is to deliver business benefits.

But that, if the CEOs of the biggest PC companies in the world are to be believed, is precisely what Java will deliver. Only a few weeks ago, Andy Grove, president and CEO of Intel, warned the 5,000 delegates at Compaq?s Innovate 97 conference in Houston, Texas, that Java is a ?megatrend? in the PC business world.

According to Grove, ?all computing in the future will be network computing?. Demonstrating a 449MHz Pentium II, Grove insisted that the Intel x86 platform and its derivatives will be the best platform to run Java. ?Java is emerging as a tool for unlocking legacy data,? he said. ?Intel?s role is to make Java run fastest on Intel architectured machines.?

His interest in Java is motivated by Intel?s desire to lock the entire world of computing into its microprocessors. Java is architecturally independent and that means you don?t necessarily need a PC to run it. He wants the world to use Net PCs, x86-based machines which can run Java, but more importantly, use Intel chips.

?The Net PC delivers performance on Java as good or better than the equivalent Sun machine and runs all the PC applications,? he said. If Java is the shape of things to come, Intel wants a slice of whatever amorphous shape that takes.

A week before, the computer industry celebrated Java at the Java One conference on the West Coast, where vendors extolled the virtues of their wares, which, keeping the coffee theme, are called Java Beans, Caffeine and the like.

At first it appeared that Java would polarise the software industry because Microsoft initially saw the language as a threat to its own development efforts. But Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, reversed his position on both the internet as a medium and on Java as a portable language. Microsoft, on the face of it at least, now seems to be committed to supporting Java.

Indeed, Simon Witts, enterprise director at Microsoft UK, claims that his company is at the forefront of developing real-world applications using the language. That will be viewed with scepticism, but also suspicion, from the Sun-led consortium which originally backed Java. Microsoft effectively owns the application software market for PCs, and if it takes over the Java world, other companies can wave goodbye to what they first saw as a competitive advantage.

So what?s the hype all about, and is there any way that the reseller and developer communities can make money out of coffee-flavoured software?

Laurence Rogerson, a director of Web developer and hosting service Hubcom Limited, does not see a basic conflict between CGI, which is essentially a tool for Web servers, and the languages used to build the client side. ?Java and Active X do not necessarily conflict. Microsoft?s J++ can access Active X controls using Java and it makes a lot of sense to shift processing to the client end,? he says.

But, Rogerson adds, VB Script and Java do conflict. ?Java is based on C and is a much tighter subset of C. As a language, it?s good. Both Java and J++ are languages that don?t demand a browser. The advantage is that you can write applications that run on any machine.?

But the programming itself can become extremely complicated because of the object technologies already embedded in browsers, he says. Nor do there seem to be many applications available written in either J++ or Java ? pure or impure. ?Java is still too young as a technology,? he claims.

One of the advantages Microsoft has is that it is effectively giving away J++, says Rogerson. This is not the first time that Microsoft has employed this tactic ? it has gained a great deal of market share in the client browser market by giving away Internet Explorer, and has the resources to keep that pot boiling. Rogerson is unsure, however, whether J++ is 100 per cent compatible with the Sun Java specification. ?I suspect it?s not ? it?s a very Microsoft-oriented environment,? he says.

Mike Farrow, proprietor of Margate-based Channel Business Systems, says it is important to his business that he can leverage both his and his customers? skills. ?Microsoft sent me a beta copy of Visual Basic 5 enterprise edition, and when I get a new version I like to do something trivial. I created an animation quickly and saved it as an Active document, loaded it to a Web browser and it was up and running,? he says.

Java is a different matter, says Farrow. ?I spent four months studying Java and was about to write the application, but Java changed the goalposts and I had to program in a different way. I invested a lot of time learning it, but I could pick VB up, write an application and it was four months? easier.?

Farrow says the reality for many thousands of developers and customers is that they have a large investment in VB routines and libraries. ?A cross-platform environment is a good idea, but it should be something that leverages the skills we already have,? he says.

?Portability is a good idea too, but not if it?s to a hardware platform that no one uses.?

He says that Microsoft appears to be offering Visual C++ and Visual Basic developers a route which will help them migrate to Java in the future. ?If I can migrate mine and my customers? skills, it?s a much easier sell than to completely start from scratch. All of us want to see a free market in software for the best tools, and we want to see innovation, but at the end of the day I?ve invested a lot of time in my skills and I don?t want to throw them all away. I want to build on them.?

The battle between Sun and Microsoft may be irrelevant to many ISVs, but it isn?t just the big players that are in the game. US company Citrix has its own Winframe technology which can be used to run NT applications without needing much memory. Citrix founder and chairman Ed Iacobucci says it is ideal for running software, whether over TV, portable computers or thin clients.

But Microsoft is eyeing up that market too. Its acquisition of Web TV and development of its own answer to Winframe, codenamed Hydra, indicates that Gates has his eyes on all aspects of the market.

Nor has Oracle CEO Larry Ellison been idle. For the past six months, he has promoted a version of an OS which will run on NCs and other devices, and also takes little memory while offering powerful functionality.

It?s a very confusing picture, and likely to become more, rather than less so, as vendors turn up the heat in an effort to win the support of ISVs and small application developers. Given the war of words, many will be tempted to watch the giants slog it out and and go make themselves a cup of coffee, choosing a bean that doesn?t bear the ubiquitous Indonesian tag.