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“Thank you for 10 great years!” Those were the opening lines of Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote on day one of Sun’s 2005 worldwide Java developer conference hosted in San Francisco. Today marks the tenth annual JavaOne and also the tenth birthday of Java. (also the tenth birthday of BEA as I learned later on) “Technology has social utility too”, continues Schwartz as he elaborates on the end of the ‘information age’. Welcome to the ‘participation age’…where participation drives social and economic progress while it blurs the classic boundaries of the digital divide.
Another message from Jonathan’s keynote is the following: Compatibility leads to community, which in turn leads to volume and growth, in the end resulting in value. So what’s the value of all this and how is the catchy phrase ‘Java is everywhere’ related to it? Today, more than 825 million Java-enabled smartcards have been issued. Java is also a key player in the mobile space with approximately 708 million mobile devices shipped! On the desktop, Sun claims there are more than 700 million desktops running Java software. Summed up over 2 billion devices running Java! Indeed Java is everywhere!
Then the festivities of 10 years of Java technology started off with a big band coming in, playing “happy birthday” and confetti raining down from the ceiling. Scott McNealy and James Gosling are joined on the stage by most of the people that formed the original “Green Project” that later became known as Java.
Next, some announcements…
As there has been a bit of a chill in the relationship between Sun and IBM lately…today, things have changed bigtime. IBM and Sun are pleased to announce a new and improved relationship. They have signed a new landmark agreement in which they agree on a 11 years collaboration effort. Yes, that’s right…11(!) years….10% more than your standard landmark agreement ;o) As a result of this rather surprising outcome, IBM was added as a late night platinum sponsor for this year’s conference and they already announce to be a platinum sponsor for next year’s conference too. As a platinum sponsor you are entitled to your own General Session, so we will be hearing more from IBM soon. From my point of view it’s a good thing to have IBM back at the JavaOne conference, as they have been working on Java with Sun shouder to shoulder from the early beginning. Another outcome of this deal is that IBM has announced to port their Websphere software to the Solaris 10 platform. This should make a lot of both companies’ customers happy.
The next cool thing presented was that the Blu ray disc consortium has officially selected Java as the software in control of the Blu ray disc player and recording devices. This means that a Java virtual machine will be included in all Blu ray devices shipping! Together with network connectivity this gives you endless possibilities, like downloading subtitles for your movie from the internet in the language that you wish even if those subtitles are not present on the disc that you bought. Digital Media will be the next great market to explore, just as mobile devices were a few years back.
Another kinda shocking announcement is that J2EE is no more! Yes that’s right…they’ve dropped the “2”. From now on the Java distributions will become known as:
- Java Platform Standard Edition 6 -> Java SE 6
- Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 -> Java EE 5
There will also be just a single version number. So Java SE 6 will not be called “6.0” but “6”. Only J2SE 5.0 escaped from this namebending…and therefor keeps its name…at least…for now. Sun also announced that there won’t be a 5.1 release of Java. All effort is going into Mustang aka Java SE 6.
Planned release schedule (based on 18 month cycle):
- Mustang – Java SE 6 – Summer 2006
- Dolphin – Java SE 7 – Early 2008
- Java EE 5 – all specs in final draft – Q3 2005
- Beta SDK available – Q4 2005
- Java EE 5 Final release – Q1 2006
Final announcement that I will be telling you about is “Project GlassFish”. Sun announced they will be fully open sourcing their Java System Application Server. Check it out at java.net.
This concludes the major announcements made at the opening keynotes. Next, I attended BEA’s General Session, visited the pavilion floor to obtain as much goodies as possible and in the afternoon the Technical Sessions kicked off. I went to see sessions on next generation web services, EJB 3.0 and desktop development features in Mustang. So much for day 1 of this already amazing conference. Final message to my Info Support colleagues: I will be covering interesting development and features of Java ME, SE and EE in a JavaOne 2005 highlights presentation on Wednesday, July 6.