JavaOne's Roar Reduced To A Meow

Word on the street was that a larger, more fierce-looking tiger was to have appeared with Schwartz, Sun president and COO; and Gosling, Sun vice president, Developer Tools CTO and fellow, to introduce the next Java standard for desktop applications. Sun nixed that plan at the last minute.

As it turns out, the appearance of a tiger cub at the annual Java developer confab was more appropriate for a conference that not so much roared as it meowed insistently. Although the show"with its legion of Java zealots practically elbowing each other out of the way to grab Java T-shirts or shake the hand of Java inventor Gosling"lived up to its geek-fest reputation, the news announcements at JavaOne didn't have the same bite as in previous years.

Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis, Sterling, Va., attributed the lack of bite partly to the fact that some of the brightest stars in Java, such as IBM and BEA Systems, "kept a low profile."

Others posited that a more mature Java can't provide the same emoti-onal kick as earlier Java milestones. "Java started out as a revolutionary new platform because the other platforms of the day didn't address the basic needs of the Internet," said Alex Burdenko, chief architect at Back Bay Technologies, Needham, Mass. "[Java] has reached a point where revolutionary growth has turned into evolutionary growth."

The conference's subdued atmosphere also simply could have been the result of Sun's financial woes over the past few years.

Given Sun's financial troubles, it's no wonder JavaOne 2004 wasn't the lavish affair it was in 2000. Back then, nearly 25,000 attendees packed San Francisco's Moscone Center and the line for the first keynote snaked around the building.

And just as there is no crying in baseball, there are no surprises"or at least very few"in the technology industry these days. Many of JavaOne's highlights were anticipated before the show, such as the release of Tiger and Sun's Java Studio Creator tool, which promises to provide corporate developers an easy-to-use Java tool that looks and feels like Microsoft Visual Basic.

Even Sun's news that it was using eBay to auction off an entire developer system"including software, tools, an OS and a workstation"didn't come as a total shock, as the vendor has been experimenting with creative ways to distribute products for some time.

Still, the open-source community managed to stir things up at the show.

Exhibiting for the first time at JavaOne, JBoss president Marc Fleury"the poster child for the professional open-source movement"arguably drew the show's most foot traffic. JBoss announced the industry's first fully J2EE-certified, open-source application server, a product that should further drive down the cost of J2EE application servers and could spell trouble for IBM and BEA.

And what's a Java get-together without some sort of spirited debate? One major topic at JavaOne was whether to open-source certain aspects of Java, such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and J2SE. IBM and BEA came out in favor while Sun continued to back the Java Commu-nity Process (JCP) and its own stewardship, and encouraged community feedback. The issue was never resolved.