A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ Sun Microsystems ]
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[Developers slam Sun over Java
At the JavaOne show, partners say Sun needs to do a better job fixing bugs and making updated source code available.
By Deborah Gage, Sm@rt Partner
June 6, 2000 4:53 AM PT
Java developers told a panel of Sun Microsystems Inc. executives Monday night that Sun should spend less time adding new features to Java and more time making Java reliable across all its major platforms. In a free-wheeling question-and-answer session with some of Sun's top software executives, developers said Sun needs to do a better job fixing bugs and should make updated source code available regardless of whether Sun decides to make Java open source.
"I've been developing seriously in Java for four years and I don't see real reliability, which to me is the most important thing for really robust B2B e-commerce," said one developer.
Added another: "The source code Sun makes available under Community Source is old, and therefore useless. I want to check against what the engineers did yesterday and find bugs before I release my software. That's what we get with Apache and Linux, and I think it's a big difference."
Executives said Sun (Nasdaq: SUNW) is improving quality across the company - including adopting General Electric's Six Sigma process - and their salaries are now tied to being responsive. "We know this. We get it," said Java software VP Rich Green, although he added that Sun could not be responsible for the quality of Java on all its partners' platforms.
Stop the torture
Developers applauded when Green promised that Sun will "stop the torture" and deliver simultaneous releases of Java on Solaris, Linux, and Windows going forward. But executives stopped short of promising open source Java, saying the Java application base is not large enough and that open source code is hard to test.
Executives could not provide developers with a clear strategy for either Java 2 Micro Edition or Jini, although they promised to get more involved with Bluetooth. They also acknowledged that Java 2 on the desktop is big and slow and subject to feature creep.
Sun VP Jon Kannegaard, who was transferred in December from the Java software group to Sun Labs, said the problems are partly due to the fact that Java did not develop as Sun anticipated--from desktops to small devices to servers--but instead took hold on the server first. Sun is trying not to add more code to the core Java platform but will swap components in and out when technically feasible.
How fast can they eat with this fork?
Executives said the breadth of Sun's partner and customer base and the breadth of the Java platform makes their jobs tough, especially as they begin to think about how to build Java to handle distributed systems. "How can we convince our audience to accept certain rates of change?" Green asked. "We're walking a delicate line between cranking out anything we can think of and thinking 'How fast can they eat with this fork?' We know how to push quickly but others don't, so we may find ourselves in the architecture education course business."
Added Chief Technology Officer and Sun Fellow Rob Gingell: "A lot of distributed computing over the last 30 years has been about making the network transparent, but we're learning that's proven to be a bad idea. Transparency works as long as everything is working, but on a large scale you assume that something is not going to work, so you have to invert people's assumptions. How do you build systems that confront those things and teach people to program?"
Among Sun's many announcements at its JavaONE developer show in San Francisco this week is a Webstart program that will run Java applications outside a browser and automatically update them.]
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