I wonder if this will have any effect on Patriot's decision to port PersonalJava to the PSC1000? Comments appreciated.
Sun's PalmPilot Deal: JavaONE Bombshell
By Deborah Gage
06/17/99 01:01:00 PM
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3Com, Motorola agreements leave Java licensees scrambling for cover.
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s deal to get Java onto 3Com's PalmPilot is widely viewed as a coup, but the cost to Sun's credibility has yet to be determined.
Sun secured deals with both 3Com Corp. and Motorola Inc. by promising to rearchitect the Java platform, and it did so without discussing the matter with its licensees. So while Sun instantly created a mass market for applications by getting Java onto one of the most widely distributed consumer appliances in the market, it left licensees scrambling for information and wondering what happened to Sun's Java Community Process and promises of openness.
Dancing With Elephants
"I see little difference right now between Sun and Microsoft," says one licensee who asked not to be named. "We're dancing with elephants."
Sun Software President Alan Baratz announced the 3Com deal and the creation of Java 2 Micro Edition at the opening keynote of Sun's JavaONE developer show in San Francisco earlier this week. Micro Edition supersedes PersonalJava, EmbeddedJava and JavaCard, which are subsets of Java Application Programming Interfaces that Sun announced two years ago in an attempt to get Java onto sub-PC devices.
Licensees for these versions have been slow in coming. Java is still too big for small devices like pagers and cell phones, and Sun's licensing terms were considered onerous (even though Sun promised to revamp its licensing procedures in December). Furthermore, Sun is under pressure from Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and several other vendors who took matters into their own hands and defined their own Java subsets for small devices. HP announced new licensees for Chai, its Java clone, last week.
Mike Clary, who was named Vice President of Sun's Consumer and Embedded division in a reorganization last month, said Sun has no intention of shutting out its licensees. Clary said he and Chief Scientist Bill Joy met with Baratz two or three weeks ago and told Baratz Sun's strategy for sub-PC devices had to change.
At the time, Motorola and SunLabs were jointly developing the K Virtual Machine, which requires less than 64K of memory and is designed for mobile devices like 3Com's upcoming Palm VII. Clary and Joy, who also developed Sun's Jini technology, want to establish one thin Java layer and allow industry groups to define "profiles," or sets of Java APIs, that would define different types of devices.
"This lets people add things as required, and it's the manufacturer's choice," Clary says. "We also told Alan we were not taking advantage of the network as well as we could. He agreed that JavaONE would be a good place to set our direction since 20,000 developers are here."
Licensees Still In The Dark
Licensees are still mostly in the dark about Java 2 Micro Edition, although Sun Vice President Jon Kannegaard says nothing has been removed from the platform. At press time Clary was meeting with executives from IBM Corp., who found out about Sun's plans the Friday before JavaONE, to discuss how IBM should handle the launch of its Pervasive Computing strategy at PCExpo next week.
"I'm shipping [VisualAge for Embedded Systems, Java Technology Edition] within 90 days, and our intention is to be compliant. Sun is the gating factor," says IBM Chief Technologist Rod Smith.
Sun has declared PersonalJava a profile for Web browsing on small devices and EmbeddedJava a configurable environment. Other profiles will presumably be defined by groups working through Sun's Java Community Process. Although Sun was selling discounted Palm Vs preloaded with Java at JavaONE, licensees could not view a specification for the K Virtual Machine.
"The market is not interested in one player," said Mal Raddalgoda of QNX Software Systems, an RTOS vendor that announced licenses of Personal and EmbeddedJava the day Baratz spoke. "There should be a series of VMs to meet diverse needs."
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