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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael L. Voorhees who wrote (10927)	8/24/1998 10:05:00 PM
From: Ed Yander	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Boots Gosling was intervied at Infoworld. I thought I would add my comments in between closed brackets []. ----------------------- Sun VP James Gosling forecasts distributed computing technologies By Michael Vizard InfoWorld Electric With Java starting to achieve critical mass, Sun Microsystems is looking to take this programming language to the next level in the form of new distributed computing technologies, called Jini and JavaSpace, that leverage object technology to build massively parallel computing applications that can run across any number of systems on a network. Sun Vice President James Gosling, the original author of Java, talked with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Michael Vizard about Java's future course. InfoWorld: What's the genesis of the Jini and JavaSpaces technology? Gosling: It was very much based on the ideas that had been worked out in a system called Linda that was done at Yale a long time ago. It's yet another one of those things that are pretty cool, but just sat there because nobody picked it up. This thing we did called JavaSpaces is just an instance of that. InfoWorld: Why is this a viable idea now? Gosling: The networks are a lot more sophisticated now. [In what way?] It also fits a lot better with an object-oriented system where the things you put into JavaSpaces are more than just pieces of data. All of a sudden, you can do a lot more exciting things. The objects can have their own behavior. InfoWorld: A lot of people see the Web as a way to more effectively centralize computing. Is the move towards distributed computing starting to falter? Gosling: It's not like there is one center; you can have as many centers as you want. None of these things are incompatible. [Except the clients which have varying hardware configs, system software revisions, network shell (browser)revs, device drivers, etc. Not exactly as simple and problem free as a green terminal multiuser host system eh?] It's not like any of these are one-size-fits-all solutions. Part of the reason that I spend so much time talking about distributed systems is that a lot of people don't really understand how to build them. What a lot of people wind up doing is building a monolithic Java application and then deciding it wasn't structured the way they wanted. That's sort of what the Corel guys did. They built what they knew how to build which was sort of a replay of WordPerfect. They had not built the thing in a distributed fashion. [I guess if Sun knew how to build them they would have done so already since they believe MSFT would be destroyed if Office revenue is significantly impacted. In fact didn't Scotty acquire a company (LightSpeed?) that had built a distributed productivy app?] InfoWorld: How will you bring Jini technology to market? Gosling: We're trying to do a free license. There's this trend in the business when it comes to enabling technology where you make a lot more money by letting go and sort of working in the after market. InfoWorld: Does that mean you going to embrace an open source code model? Gosling: We have believed in that kind of thing for a long time. [Yeah, for about a week now. LOL.] The way we distribute Java has been pretty close to that. It's a very powerful thing to do. We've actually had those debates with Solaris. But we've had this problem where everything pretty much derives from the original license with Unix. We've been trying to get the IP stack cleaned up so we can release it. If we can figure a way around the license issues we have with other vendors, then we would do some sort of open source version. InfoWorld: Does Sun spend time working with the Linux community? Gosling: We've done some stuff, but not as much as we should. There's an active group working on Linux versions of the JavaBean. We try to give them a helping hand whenever we can, but we don't have infinite cash. But it tends to be a disorganized bunch. It really is a bunch of cats that need herding [in SUNS DIRECTION of course]. They tend to be remarkably effective [disorganized but effective???], but we don't have energy to get in there and try and drive it. InfoWorld: Some vendors are talking about ways to dynamically link CORBA and Microsoft's COM architectures. Is this possible? Gosling: It sounds fairly feasible. I can imagine all kinds of interesting issues that could get out of control. But CORBA and COM are almost the same thing. COM in some senses is a copy of CORBA. And doing symantec mapping is certainly possible. InfoWorld: What's Sun's relationship with Microsoft like these days? Any sign of glasnost? Gosling: The lawsuit has kind of muddled everything. So it's hard to tell. InfoWorld: What do you make of NT 5.0? Gosling: It will be interesting to see it when it does ship because it's suppose to have 16 million lines of code, most of which are new. The reliability of that sucker is going to very entertaining. [You mean like the JDK is now?] As a competitor, we might be better off if they shipped it. [I doubt it] InfoWorld: Microsoft is beginning to talk about a Project Millenium that seems to embrace some of the same concepts as Jini. Any worries? Gosling: There isn't enough detail and reality to do anything like Jini. We've heard it's a federated distributed operating system. But that's it. InfoWorld: In general, where do application servers fit in? Gosling: Sometimes I have a hard time telling the difference between a Web server and an application server. As far as I can tell, it's a marketing phrase. We've done some standard simple APIs, called servlets, that take you into a Web server, but there are lots of other ways to do that. Technology tends to go one way and marketing another. InfoWorld: Does XML have a role to play in middleware? Gosling: XML is a file format. It's tag surrounding piece of data. What a lot of people have done is use to Java to describe the means for the tags. InfoWorld: So what are you focused on most now? Gosling: Right now nothing matters more to us than shipping the next JDK release. Everything is focused on getting it out the door. ---------------------- This interview was technological psychobabble courtesy of James Gosling. But at least Gosling helped invent something new not like Linus (I became famous by reinventing a 30 year old operating system and slapping my name on it) Torvalds.