Kal and all, has this been posted? From the Philippines...
MACTAN, CEBU, PHILIPPINES, 1997 DEC 16 (NB) -- By Prudence Orani,
Metropolitan Computer Times. The rapid deployment of applications based
on Java, the "write once, run anywhere" programming language, as well
as the rapid roll-out of devices such as Internet/Web phones enabled
by Java, will take place in 1998, according to predictions from Sun
Microsystems [NASDAQ:SUNW].
Java-enabled smart cards and set-top TV boxes will become more
pervasive in 1999 and Java-enabled consumer items like cellular phones
with built-in displays, pagers, PDAs (personal digital assistants),
palmtops, pens, watches, pens, rings, among others, will reach the
mass market by the year 2000, according to officials of Sun
Microsystems Computer Co. at the Sun Asia Press Symposium held over the
weekend at Shangri-La's Mactan Island Resort.
In the year 2000, there will be an avalanche of Java-enabled "smart"
consumer devices, and total unit shipments for these reach the 1,000
million mark, Lionel Lim, managing director of Sun Asia South told
Newsbytes in an interview. Lim said that by then, unit shipments of
consumer, telecommunications, and computing devices that run on the
Java platform, will have outpaced that of similar products based on
the Wintel (Windows OS and Intel chip) platform.
In its first 800 days, Java seats have jumped from zero to about 70
million, reported Masood Jabbar, chief financial officer and vice
president of Sun. Similarly, Java developers soared to over 400,000,
JDK 1.1 (Java Development Kit) downloads to one million, Java
application shipments to over 1,000, universities offering Java courses
to over 200, books-in-print on Java to over 800, Newsbytes learned.
As it scales from smart cards to supercomputers, Java is driving the
computing industry forward, asserted Jabbar. Beyond the desktop is
Java, Jabbar said, predicting that smart devices such as screen phones,
NetTVs, handheld PDAs, game consoles, and other similar devices, in
more powerful home networks will grow from less than one million in
1996 to over 40 million in year 2001.
Sun reckons that in North America alone, the 13 million smart cards
deployed last year would grow to 273 million in year 2001.
Accordingly, smart card users will reach 3.75 billion worldwide by
year 2005, they say.
All these numbers indicate a big opportunity for a company like Sun and
for a computing paradigm like Java, said Jabbar. Java, which offers
strong memory protection, encryption and signatures, rules enforcement,
and runtime verification, could also open up tremendous opportunities to
build "intelligent" Java-enabled industrial device like a shop floor,
machine control, point-of-sale system, or even a car, according to both
Jabbar and Lim.
Lim explained that Java offers a "new computing paradigm," one that
does not shut out people and gives users a lot of choices and
"stateless" or platform-independent devices. "Java is a key that
unlocks the world of computing to the masses," Lim emphasized.
Accordingly, Java, as a portable, interpreted, high-performance, simple
object-oriented programming language and runtime environment, provides
a means of developing applications that can run securely on any
device, regardless of operating system, without porting.
As a computing paradigm, Java consists of three components, namely the
server, the "fat pipe," and the client. The server serves Java
applications, comprising of Java applets, on demand. Java applets, it
must be noted, are small applications typically embedded in a Web
server, and can run from within the Web browser or downloaded on demand
to the client's browser where it will run specifically on the Java
Virtual Machine (VM). A platform-independent "soft" machine or "an
abstract computer" that can be implemented in either hardware or
software, the Java VM is designed to reside on top of existing
processors. In contrast, Lim noted, applications running on the
current computing architecture - Wintel applications using the Pentium
chip, Mac applications running on PowerPC chips, and Unix applications
on RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processors - are generally
dependent on operating system, which in turn, is dependent on CPU.
Philippine Systems Products, Inc. (PSPI), authorized Sun partner,
helped coordinate the three-day press event attended by the press from
China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and
Thailand.
Reported by Newsbytes News Network: http//www.newsbytes.com . |
