Despite being one of the primary inventors of the popular development language, Gosling spent the last couple years detached from daily development of Java within Sun. The well-known software engineer took a "technologist's vacation" and started his own research project, called "Jackpot," looking at ways to make programming easier.
Now, Gosling can don the "Java guru" hat again. In November, he became chief technology officer of Sun's development tools division. He's contributing some of the work from Jackpot and working on the overall strategy of Sun's tools division.
Gosling's re-entry into the Java product development is the latest in a number of steps that Sun is taking to reinvigorate its development tools and, more generally, its software business. Sun's top software executive, Jonathan Schwartz, calls developers the "lifeblood of any technology company." But at this point, some aspects of Sun's Java software health appear somewhat anaemic. Despite being the founder and steward of Java, the company lags behind competitors in market share for Java server software and tools.
Sun is making software a top priority. In the past several months, the company has introduced its Linux-based desktop system, revamped the way it sells its Java server software package and invested in its developer outreach programs, including its NetBeans open-source tools project. And Gosling is returning to the fold to try to re-create the early successes of Java for Sun.
Gosling recently spoke to CNET News.com about his return to Sun and about the overall software development industry.
Q: Sun was one of the big backers behind the creation of the Java Tools Community (JTC), which is supposed to lobby for better tools within the Java standards process. Why did that need to be created?
There are a lot of existing standard efforts where the technology itself doesn't really have a tool component, but it ends up having to interact with tools... It is kind of a metaissue, and it is not one you can just isolate and say, "the tools issue is here." It really crosses a broad spectrum of different activities. To try to tease out the common themes across this broad spectrum -- that's really what the JTC is all about.
It should not have taken several years -- that sort of extended process -- for Web server deployment to really smoothly integrate with tools. It should be much quicker.
