Ten years ago, Sun publicly debuted Java, software that initially helped establish the company's forward-thinking reputation and that later spread to most corners of the computer industry. James Gosling is the man behind the technology.
In the early 1990s, Gosling initiated and led a project code-named Green that eventually became Java. The basic idea behind it is that a program will run on a variety of computing devices without having to be customised for each one. For example, a game written for a one mobile phone equipped with a Java virtual machine should work on another.
The technology has faced numerous challenges over the last decade. Early ally Microsoft, realising that the universality of Java programs didn't bode well for Windows, created a Windows-specific version of Java that worked slightly differently and triggered a seven-year legal fight. Different flavours of Java had to be created for domains such as gadgets, PCs and servers. Sun struggled to find a good way to share control over Java with other companies. And now many, including IBM, are calling on Sun to release the core parts of Java as open source software.
Despite it all, Java has become a fixture in the computing realm. Sun chief executive Scott McNealy can be prone to grandiose statements, but he wasn't far off the mark when he declared on Tuesday at Sun's JavaOne trade show, "It would almost be embarrassing to listen to the JavaOne keynotes from seven, eight or nine years ago. We absolutely underhyped it. We had no clue what this technology was going to do."
Gosling is on constant display at JavaOne trade show this week, now sporting a mane of white hair and an invariable outfit of jeans, T-shirt and Birkenstock shoes. "He looks like an aging hippie," his daughter said in a tribute video on Tuesday that had the 50-year-old Java patriarch blushing on stage.
ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland sat down on Tuesday to hear Gosling's thoughts on Java.
Q: When you started designing Java, did you have in mind a concept of what it might become?
Back in the Green project days, we talked a lot about the long-distance future. We wrote up a little book of scenarios. A lot of the design of Java was driven by that scenario exercise that we went through. For me, it was more an exercise in science fiction. You never really know which way the world is going to go. You get moderately good at reading the way the wind is blowing and forecasting technology, but there's a long distance between speculating and believing it would happen. I certainly believed that Moore's Law was on a rail, and it was pretty easy to connect the dots as networking spread.
I was absolutely confident that the various technologies were going to go that way and there were issues that were going to happen around security and reliability and portability. Ending up actually participating in the big part of answering those questions is really what came as surprise.
