Please feel free to forward this newsletter to as many friends as possible. I have a personal goal of having one million readers. I can achieve it with your help

the Software View: Java^TM, a wonderful brew (Part IV)

Welcome back, gentle reader. Something serendipitous happened to me on Thursday. I was introduced to a newsfeed weekly called JavaVision. The publisher is Dr. Simon Moores, the editor is Karl Dallas, and the "ball of fire" Marketing Manager is Tony Larks. Their web address is http://www.javavision.org For Java news junkies like me, this publication is a godsend. When I read the newsfeed and saw the web site, I felt I'd died and gone to Heaven. Of course, my favorite part of their newsfeed is entitled "The Rumour Mill". Let me quote from their Issue 19, "Sun's been promised orders for quarter-of-a-million JavaStations from 50 major customers". That should silence all those network computer naysayers. Do give their web site a look-see and sign up for their newsfeed.

For those of you with Internet and World Wide Web access and a Netscape Navigator web browser, please point your browser to:
http://www.softwareview.com/
Scroll down the page and you will spy a link entitled, "Current views web log (fresh news daily! Click reload, clear the browser cache)" The daily news page is also known as a "web log". It is en vogue and the fashion of these days to call it that. Click on the link, click "reload" on your browser or clear your browser cache to ensure that you always receive the freshest, hottest daily news concerning Java, Linux, XML, and the software industry! The link never changes, but I will be updating the HTML file page behind it every day. Please, do take a gander at it every day.

Also, some important news, gentle readers. the Software View is now an Associate Internet World Wide Web site of Amazon.com. I would like to extend my sincere, heartfelt gratitude and thanks for your patronage. I am offering links to books, et cetera that you can purchase from my web site. I would greatly appreciate it if you would purchase software industry books from my web site. Help support my newsletter and web site by purchasing items from Amazon.com from my web site. Here is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
Click here

Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!

I had some musings this week about Microsoft. Aren't you shocked?! Anyway, facing the threat of government actions from state Attorneys General and the U.S. Department of Justice that could delay the release of Windows 98, Bill Gates and Microsoft staged a controversial industry rally to support what it called its right to deliver innovative products. On a stage crowded with more than 30 representatives from the information technology industry, Bill Gates, several other chief executives from leading technology vendors toadying fealty, and a Harvard University economist said a government-forced delay would hurt the computer trade, users, and the U.S. economy in general. Well, you can fool some people some of the time. What a crock. Yeah, like software engineers and programmers will have to find new jobs if Windows 98 doesn't ship on time. Give me a break ... The audacity of Bill Gates! To claim that what's good for him is good for America!

But then I stopped to think. Bill Gates had no choice but to cry Chicken Little. Think about it. If any government official delays the release of Windows 98, this action will greatly impact Microsoft's stock price, and to its detriment. Microsoft's stock will sink like a rock. Its whole business model is based upon selling upgrades to all its users about every 18 months. Now, what is one of the keys to Microsoft's success? Bill Gates allows his employees to share in his wealth. The majority of Microsoft's outstanding shares are owned by its employees via stock grants and stock options. These stock options are known as "golden hand cuffs". They enable Microsoft to hold on to its key employees and impel people to work 80 hours a week. If I work harder, the stock price goes up, and I get richer. If Microsoft's stock takes a dive, you'll see people throwing themselves from the top floor windows of the cluster of new high-rise buildings being built on the Microsoft corporate campus, also known as "Augusta". The threat to Microsoft's stock is why Bill Gates had to prattle about sounding dire warnings that any delay to the release of Windows 98 would bring about the fall of Western Civilization.

One of my readers, Jon Peters, passed along a cool tip about the JavaRing that was introduced at JavaOne. Another of my readers, Joe Gilbreth, asks, "Mark, is Java of any present interest or value to ordinary users? Are there applications like word processors, databases, etc? If so, how would these be run in the present Windows environment? Joe, for Java word processors, check out Lotus' eSuite, Corel Office for Java, StarOffice, and Applix. For Java databases, check out Object Design, Jeevan, and InstantDB.

Now, dear reader, in this episode, I want to give you the true Java philosophy, straight from its creator, Sun Fellow and Vice President, James Gosling. Meme's David Bennahum interviewed him.

"A lot of what was unusual about it was that it was a very flexible system, you could program it to do whatever you wanted. That has been a theme in my life, building systems that are very flexible and very programmable, so you can take the tool and mold it to do whatever you want it to do"

"The computer business by and large builds tools for geeks, and in some sense Java is a tool for geeks since geeks are the ones that build the software, but the products they produce are not for geeks, they are for real people. Java shuffles the priority list of what's important. As soon as you shuffle the priority list by thinking about building systems for real people out there, then a lot of design decisions change. One way of thinking about Java is all about is what happens when you reshuffle the priority list, so issues like building systems that are reliable and safe and secure, these all end up being more important than being able to run some old FORTRAN program, or getting really good performance numbers, or being able to run all these old applications people have lying around. They are more important than a lot of the technical traditions, because a lot of technical traditions that are tied up in the C programming language are a real problem. After talking to folks the priority list shuffles, the design shuffles. So we learned a lot of interesting things and it was accidental that the World Wide Web came along, and the Web was a situation that needed exactly the stuff we working on." In other words, Java is not encumbered with the requirement of backward compatibility. This is what makes the Windows architecture sick and very inelegant. Microsoft is burdened with backward compatibility with every DOS, Win16, and Win32s program out there.

The philosophy of Java is "To build the human oriented software that's intended to be woven into a Network of devices that all interact with people and interact with each other, and build a Network structure that is tightly integrated, rather than being a bunch of little islands."

"One of the things we did that was unusual from most people's point of view, although it seems ordinary to me, is that we did not go out and talk about it until we had something to release. We just threw it over the wall when it was finished and running, with stacks of documentation and papers explaining what it all was, and that it was something that people could just get and use and play with. Java is really a general purpose programming language which is designed to deal with these very flexible distributed systems."

"The high-order bit is empowering people to be creative and not limiting them to what you can do on a piece of paper. This digital medium is much more expressive; you can do many more things. The other part of that is to do it in a way that creates an environment where people feel safe. I want people to be able to go to a home page at some high school in Zimbabwe, get a piece of active content from there, be able to run it, and be able to interact with these folks without being afraid that something awful is going to happen."

Datamation's Vance McCarthy interviewed him. "But I think the real truth is that they're very different things [Windows vs. Java]. That they have different goals. It's just sort of the mechanism, and it's really centered around building these pieces of behavior that migrate around the Web. And, yes, you can load it up with all of the stuff to make it a full-fledged operating system, and there are some people who are bravely off there doing it. But that doesn't mean the goal was ever to supplant Windows or supplant UNIX or supplant the Mac OS. The goal was rather to provide sort of a unifying view on top of all of them. The whole point of Java was platform independence. That is, the language itself doesn't care what sort of OS is underneath. That's what makes it so useful for the Web. You can be using any OS in any location, and still use a Java applet."

The Computer Bulletin interviewed him. "Java was born out of frustration. One of the important things about Java is that it’s never been something done as an end in itself. It was always a tool for the job. It really solves developers' problems rather than exploring some sort of academic puzzle. Making technology invisible is extremely important. The people using computers have something else they’re trying to do. Java-based applications will soon run on all kinds of devices, including cellular phones, pagers, TV sets, games machines and even smartcards. This will create new and exciting ways of providing banking and financial services to both the business world and consumers." We have to think outside the box and not limit our world view to Wintel personal computers. Any IP-based device with a CPU can speak Java.

From the ComputerWorld interview, "People are having a hard time coming to grips with what the impact is of the network on software. How do you build software that exploits the fact that you're not on a little stand-alone box, but you're part of a community? It's about cooperating and collaborating. How do you build a spreadsheet that lets you collaborate? How do you do collaborative editing? How do you do workflow management? It's not about Java. It's about the network. The people who just rebuild in Java are missing the boat. The opportunity is there to rethink things completely. When you're building distributed applications, there's a way to think differently. A lot of that really hasn't gotten into the collective consciousness of the development community. It could [be a platform], but it works very nicely on top of an existing operating system. Java isn't so much about providing facilities but providing interfaces to facilities. We don't provide a file system. We provide an interface to a file system."

And from the 1996 JavaOne conference, "One of the important things that we did when we first launched Java was to take the whole source of the system and put it out on our Web site. That did a number of things. There was the crowd of people who just play - they just had fun with it. They could have had fun with just the binaries, but they also like to have fun with the source, because given the kind of people that are on the Internet, that's sort of what fun is, right? Then there were the people who were doing marginally useful things, like porting it, which was very interesting to watch, that is, watching people port it to lots of different platforms. But in the end, probably the most important reason for putting the source out was to allow people to scrutinize it. One of the things that we tried very hard to do was to have a story about how to build safe and trustworthy systems. A lot of that depends on how the guts of the thing are built. We've got huge test suites; last time I asked we had well over 2,000 different test programs that are applied every time we do a release. A lot of these are checks on security issues, but you really need to have clever people out there just staring at it, and having this large community of people on the Net who have been doing this stuff and discovering that they can send their bug reports to USA Today."

To be continued ...

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

Join my free e-mail newsletter called the Software View by clicking here or sending mail to thesoftwareview-owner@west-point.org