..... this is huge ..... Wall Street Journal today (072999)
July 29, 1999 Sun Micro's Java Makes Headway In Business-Software Applications By DAVID P. HAMILTON, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Four years ago, Sun Microsystems Inc. raised hopes that its Java
programming language would break Microsoft Corp.'s grip on the software industry -- then saw them largely dashed when the technology didn't meet expectations.
Sun soon could have its vindication. Java, often dismissed as too unwieldy to displace traditional programming languages, is fast emerging as a key tool for building new software applications that streamline business management and power Internet commerce. That poses a problem for Microsoft, which has staked its biggest hopes for growth on dominating those markets with its Windows NT operating system and related applications.
"Java has come very far, much further in a shorter amount of time than anyone could expect," says Larry Perlstein, an analyst with Dataquest Inc. "The credit for that really has to go to Sun."
Consider that Sun's big Java trade show in June, drew 21,000 atendees, a 50% increase from last year. By the end of June, nearly one million
software developers had registered as members of the Java Developer
Connection, an online forum for Java programmers, up from 790,000 in
January.
Java has a long way to go before it is anywhere close to being what Sun Chairman Scott McNealy calls "the written and spoken language of
network computing." So far, it has failed to endanger Microsoft's lock on personal-computer software, and while Sun has struck a number of deals intended to make Java programs a standard for new Iternet-enabled cellular phones, TV set-top boxes and other gadgets, that effort is still embryonic.
Microsoft, in fact, scoffs that Sun again is promising more than Java can deliver. "Java on the [PC] client generated significant hype and momentum, but failed to deliver on its promise," says Tod Nielsen, a Microsoft vice president for development. Now, he says, Java's latest iteration "is starting to run into the same mistaken expectations."
Still, achieving a foothold in corporate computing is an important milestone for Java, which Sun hopes can thwart Microsoft's drive to dominate corporate servers, or central computers, as thoroughly as it does PC desktops. Embrace of the technology by corporate information officers demonstrates that many developers find Java useful, if not indispensable, for building the complicated applications that run modern business. A few, in fact, even argue that Java -- and not competing technologies from Microsoft -- has already become the de facto standard for new business-software development.
"My guys are in love with the stuff," says Ron Griffin, chief information officer at Home Depot Inc., which now uses Java almost exclusively for new software development. "It gives us a lot more flexibility."
Programs written in Java typically can run on any number of types and brands of computers without major modifications. That's a threat to
Microsoft, which has thrived by fostering the development of programs
that only run on computers that use Microsoft's operating systems. Java's ability to run on a variety of machines not only breaks that "application lock," but also makes it far easier for companies to develop new software that can be used anywhere across far-flung data networks.
Home Depot, for instance, last year processed about 40 billion internal computer transactions across 800 central servers and more than 50,000 other computing devices throughout the company. By using Java to write new applications, such as one that manages the huge flow of data from Home Depot's telephone call centers, Mr. Griffin's team has a much easier time managing software across those machines.
Java is getting another significant boost from the rise of so-called
application servers, which are used to host database-analysis applications, Internet-based e-mail and calendars, and electronic commerce. The makers of such application servers increasing rely on Java to perform complex calculations on data that reside on incompatible computers.
The latest evolution of Java, a new technology known as Enterprise
JavaBeans, or EJB, is where Java's promise has truly started to take hold. EJB allows programmers to write large programs in reusable chunks, or "beans," that can be swapped out, updated, and recombined to form new programs. Such component-based programming suddenly makes it possible to develop, test and maintain much more complicated programs -- which may be distributed across hundreds or thousands of servers -- more quickly than ever before.
EJB is "the advent of the second industrial revolution of computing," says William Coleman III, founder and chairman of BEA Systems Inc., a major developer of application-server software. The first, he says, was Microsoft's Windows, which made it possible to develop standard
programs for virtually the entire PC world.
Last year, for instance, BEA was able to use EJB to build a new billing system for DirecTV, a unit of General Motors Corp.'s Hughes Electronics Corp., in just five months instead of the two to three years it would have taken to write using traditional programming techniques, Mr. Coleman says. Even better, BEA was later able to reuse some of that same software to develop another billing system for a separate customer in just 21 days.
Brokerage firm Charles Schwab & Co. has just completed a fixed-income
trading system using EJB as a trial project. "Enterprise JavaBeans is
definitely a strategic direction for us," says Lisa Villarreal, a Schwab vice president. "It's given us the ability to launch new products and new channels very quickly."
Microsoft is promoting a rival technology it calls the distributed component object model, or DCOM, which also helps programmers write modular software. DCOM, however, has one big weakness -- it only runs on Microsoft's Windows NT, which remains far less reliable than other
corporate operating systems such as Unix. Schwab, for instance, worried that it couldn't use DCOM for larger transactions and didn't even consider it as a way of developing new applications.
Java, however, faces further trials. Microsoft continues to press forward with new versions of Windows and its component software model, and could threaten to fragment Java itself. In May, a federal judge tentatively ruled that Microsoft is free to develop and market its own version of Java so long as it doesn't use Sun's intellectual property, a step that could destroy Java's universality. Microsoft hasn't said whether it will do this, although the company has dropped broad hints that such a move could be in the works.
Sun's Java allies insist that even Microsoft can't splinter their alliance. Says Pat Sueltz, general manager of Java at International Business Machines Corp., "Java is bigger than any one company -- it's bigger than Sun, Microsoft, Oracle or IBM."<i/> |
