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Editorial
(June 13,
2001)
From
Publisher and Managing Editor's
Desk...
JavaOne Conference
(held in San Francisco June4-6) Establishes Java As Preferred Application Development Environment
JavaOne conference last
week in San Francisco set a tone for application development in a
number of ways. We make some
observations on this important event.
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In our view, time
for Java-based development has come. Java application
development platform in its different incarnations (kernel
development SDK's for product developers, J2ME for handheld and
embedded devices, J2EE, Java beans and a host of application
integration connectors) has become a matured platform. No longer
do you need to poke fun at Java enthusiasts that their code will
break down every thirty minutes. On handhelds and smart phones,
it breaks down only once a day now - huge progress, we say. In
server environments, it is highly stable. Do we remember how
long do competing platforms stay alive without a hiccup? Sure,
there is room for more improvement and stable operation for Java
but any software that grows so fast will go through a similar
environment. Therefore, you must emphasize thorough application
and product testing. See our story on NTT
DoCoMo experience.
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Java has, by far,
the widest hardware platform reach - from tiny embedded systems,
smart phones, handhelds, servers and large enterprise
application servers. In our view, no other product can match
that.
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J2ME has attracted
strong following from large systems integrators like IBM and
wireless vendors like Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, RIM and
others. Nokia has said that it will ship 100 million
Java-enabled phones by the end of 2003.
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Microsoft's .NET
initiative does not address the same requirements. More
importantly, it does not have the same product and platform
reach. We would gladly publish arguments from .NET
enthusiasts.
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Right at this
juncture, there is a significant population trained around the
world in Java technology. If 20,000 attendees at this year's
conference alone is any indication, we do have a pretty good
trained resource to meet our development needs. It appears to us
that every young computer science graduate from a university or
a vocational college has some Java coding experience.
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In a survey of 521
developers conducted by Evans Data market research company during
February 2001, 29.7% opted for J2ME, 24.5% for Palm, 22.3% for Windows, 6.8%
Linux, 2.3% EPOC, 14% others). See
summary page on Evans Data site.
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It is true that Palm
economy boasts of over 100,000 developers. However, most
of these developers are not true enterprise application
programmers with C++ and Java skills and are not charged with
the task of serious enterprise applications. Many of these
applications are simple offline applications that extend the
capabilities of Palm. Please do not get us wrong - we are not
belittling the applications that they are writing. We are just
putting them in the right class. In our estimation, serious
functionally-rich and performance-efficient applications that
can be integrated with backend J2EE-controlled application
servers (there are plenty of them around now) and enterprise
super-servers can be built only on Java platform. PalmOS will
take quite a while, if at all, to reach that breadth.
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In order to build
optimized applications on small foot print handheld devices, we
advise product developers to consider a hybrid approach - native
SDKs like BREW for low-level hardware drivers and Java for
applications. We urge vendors like Qualcomm to support Java
wholeheartedly. We strongly believe that it is in their interest
to do so.
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We urge Sun to be
more open than it has been in letting Java brew out of the
coffee pot which seems to have a rather tight lid.
Chander
Dhawan - Your Site's Principal Consultant and Publisher
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