Sun Kicks Off JavaOne Without Usual Flair

Despite much fanfare outside the Moscone Center here--including Sun-sponsored Hells' Angel-types on Harleys vrooming around the downtown streets before the show opened--the keynote speeches that kicked off Sun's JavaOne 2001 conference inside the venue were rather subdued.

Noticeably absent from the opening keynotes of Sun's annual Java developer show was Sun Chief Executive and Chairman Scott McNealy, who is not attending the show, and his infamous Top 10 lists, which usually offer scathing criticisms of the latest Microsoft technologies.

Without McNealy, the anti-Microsoft sentiment was held to a minimum, and Sun executives--including Sun Chief Researcher and Vice President John Gage, President and COO Ed Zander and General Manager for Java Software Rich Green--chose instead to highlight the final arrival of Java on multiple devices, and the latest technologies from both Sun and its partners. They did so in vanilla fashion compared to last year's JavaOne, when Sun execs were joined by high-profile names such as Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former NBA star Magic Johnson to laud Java development.

Among the technologies that took center stage Monday morning were, as expected, Java 2, Micro Edition (J2ME), the Java specification for developing apps on wireless devices, and Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), the de facto industry standard for developing enterprise-scale Java apps.

Green, who took the stage following Gage and Zander, was the only Sun executive to make any new Sun announcements during the keynotes. He outlined a new developer technology called the Web Services Pack, which is available for free from Sun.

The package includes three technologies: Tomcat, the Sun official reference implementation of Java servlets; JAX Pack, a collection of Java APIs for XML to speed integration of the two technologies; and Java Server Faces, a graphical toolkit to enhance Java Server Pages (JSPs).

"This is a complete pack for development and deployment of Web services," said Green, who added that developers can use existing skill sets and tools to develop services with the Web Services Pack. Green then introduced executives from tools vendors Borland, Macromedia, Oracle, WebGain and Sun's Forte division to demonstrate that these companies support Sun's Web Services Pack in their tools.

Green also said the next version of J2EE (J2EE 1.3) will have more XML support than the current version of J2EE. J2EE 1.3 is currently under public revision in the Java Community Process (JCP), which is a group of vendors who decide future Java specifications. Green added that J2EE 1.4, which is already in its first stages of development in the JCP, will have full support for Web services.

J2ME, the other star of the show, also got its share of attention on the Moscone stage.

During Zander's speech, Sony demonstrated a J2ME-enabled PlayStation 2, which will enable developers to create apps so users of Sony's explosively popular game can connect to the Internet and contact myriad devices through the PlayStation.

During Green's speech, Nextel and Motorola executives made one of the more interesting enterprise announcements of the day: their companies currently are working to develop cell phones supporting SSL, which will enable secure transactions for multiple devices. This would protect sensitive information that travels over the network from Java clients to Java servers and back, and create an environment for secure enterprise apps to be deployed.

Motorola and Nextel are the first handset provider and wireless service provider, respectively, to deliver Java-enabled cell phones in the United States with the i85 series phone.

The two companies also demonstrated the downloading of J2ME apps over the air without a wired connection to the Internet, a service that executives said should be available over the next several months.

In his talk, Zander, who appeared less energetic than usual, both chided the press for not lauding Java enough and pleaded with developers to help propel Java as the backbone for "the next generation of Web services."

"We need to do a lot more with Java to create the second generation of the Web, something called Web services," said Zander. "It is up to us in this room today to participate in some kind of vigorous [movement] to create next-generation standards and services."

Later at a Q&A, Zander attributed his subdued tone to his opinion that JavaOne should highlight the strength of Java and celebrate Java development, not to pit Sun against Microsoft. He also denied that his sober tone was in reaction to Sun lowering its earnings expectations for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2001, which it did last week.

Zander did, however, stress that while the press likes to talk about Microsoft's "vapor" technologies, such as C# and Hailstorm, it fails to give Java its due.

"You see a Sony, you see a Motorola, you see a Nextel, you see a Visa, you see an American Express, what are you waiting for?" Zander asked the press, referring to some of the companies highlighted in Monday's keynotes. "I didn't see C# in any of those devices. I didn't see Hailstorm ... in any of those devices. Yet I see the world rallying around Java, and that's what we're here to talk about."