Tom's Blog

During a JavaOne session today, Linda DeMichiel, Sun's EJB specification lead, said the EJB 3.0 experts group wants to make writing EJBs easier so that even "corporate developers" could write EJBs.

Yesterday, I heard a Sun person say one of the goals of Java Studio Creator is to allow "corporate developers" to write Java web applications.

Do corporations just hire less-skilled developers? Or does something happen to a developer when he or she joins a big corporation?

Update: Since my attempt at irony didn't come across after three hours of sleep, I want to point out that corporate developer is an unfair term when what is meant is lesser-skilled developer.

Tuesday June 29, 2004 Permalink Comments [6]

Can you run multiple Java applications in one virtual machine to boost speed and reduce memory requirements? Apparently, engineers at Sun are trying to find a way to do this. And from this first JavaOne session I attended this morning, it sounds like this could happen in the next year or so.

This research effort at Sun is called Project Barcelona, being led by Grzegorz Czajkowski, a senior staff engineer at Sun. Sun wants a JVM to run multiple applications in order to:

• Improve application startup time
• Boost performance
• Lower the memory footprint for Java apps.

Some fruits of Barcelona will be available in the new HotSpot JVM in J2SE 1.5. Those improvements will allow classes running in different JVMs to share some read-only data. But Grzegorz Czajkowski stressed that Barcelona still is a project, not a product. The first real product to allow multiple Java applications to run in the same JVM should come this fall in the Connected Limited Device Configuration of J2ME, he said.

The Barcelona project has created a Multitasking Virtual Machine. MVM works using a daemon process on Solaris, called the mserver, and acts as a central point of contact for all Java applications that want to run. The Java startup command becomes a short-running application to contact the mserver daemon, which starts the Java app within its single JVM. Pretty neat.

The current MVM shares common classes, bytecodes and some of the runtime system, Grzegorz Czajkowski said. The MVM is in charge of isolating the different applications to ensure they don't collide with each other, and that security constraints are still handled on an application level and don't run with the security permissions of the MVM. Here's the great news:

• Application startup time is reduced by about 96% for non-GUI applications, 33% for GUIs.
• Memory requirements shrink 30% to 50% for each application.
• Runtime performance suffers only slightly. I think he said the MVM creates a performance overhead of only about 1%.

If Sun can make the MVM part of Java, our Java applications should become less of the memory hogs they are, and start up much faster. Can you imagine the day when Eclipse launches in a few seconds rather than after you've returned from your coffee break?

Tuesday June 29, 2004 Permalink Comments [2]

Scott McNealy, during his JaveOne keynote today, made sure everyone knew Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are partners moving forward. With a $2.4 billion check, MS and Sun will be working together for the next 10 years, getting the Liberty Alliance and Passport systems working together, getting LDAP and MS Directory Server to work together for an enterprise single-signon solution, integrating .NET and Java, and other joint ventures.

But even though Sun and MS will be working together, the Redmond relationship isn't all warm and fuzzy. First, he publicly invited Microsoft to get involved in the Java Community Process.

"Come to class and participate and contribute," he told the crowd. "This is my open letter."

Apparently, his private invitation for Microsoft to join the JCP hasn't worked, and a little public pressure was in order. Second, McNealy took a few digs at Windows. He referred to the Java Deskstop System as an "upgrade" to Windows, then blasted Windows for being a warm, moist and welcoming host for a plethora of computer viruses. Viruses cost companies $300 billion a year, he said.

"Where's the outrage against viruses? ... They're Microsoft viruses."

Some other notable remarks from McNealy:

• Sun will continue running Java.
  "Someone's gotta be in charge." And that someone will be Sun in the foreseeable future, apparently.
• 90% of all web visitors will hit a site running Java.
  "Java is everywhere," he said. "You can't get away from it."
• Sun is healthy and isn't going anywhere.
  A little scary that McNealy felt he had to say this. But he pointed out that sales are up and the latest quarter's numbers that will be announced in a few weeks will reinforce this, he said.
• Java.net has 41,000 members, with 1,000 open-source projects hosted.
• Project Looking Glass is now open source under the GPL.
  This was announced yesterday, as coming soon. Soon turned out to be today.
• Legislation to force companies to expense stock options will harm innovation.
  He said everyone with stock options will lose them if companies have to count them as expenses. Tell your representatives in Congress to stop the move toward the requirement for companies to consider options an expense. "We can't have this world run by accountants," he said.

Now, I'm off to the technical sessions. I'll update later today on what was interesting.

Tuesday June 29, 2004 Permalink