Green: The whole point of JavaFirst is taking all these Web services systems and if you want to sort of squint and look into
the future, it’s [about] full services-based architectures. [We want to] make them available to mobile devices. What we showed
on stage was essentially expressing the services-based architecture in such a way that you can automatically generate the
client interfaces. What that system essentially does is it looks at the interfaces of your services-based architecture and
it generates a proxy for it in a protocol that is readily expressed to the client, and then generates a set of client subs
that allows these systems to talk. So you have a big Web services system, you run the tool against it, and what you get is
essentially a port that supports all these services. And you get a client that you download onto your mobile device that can
talk to it. And then you just attach the interface to it and you’re done. And it’s really cool.
InfoWorld: We're moving to a world where cell phones and converged devices are not hard-coded anymore.
Green: Yes, they used to be phones, now they’re -- albeit lightly -- a general-purpose computer. But the first app that it
runs is telephony.
InfoWorld: When can we expect to see real-world instantiations of JavaFirst?
Anders: We have what we call the Sun ONE Studio Mobile Edition, which is a development environment for developers who want
to build [MID-P midlets], and that’s really just a collection of plug-ins or modules that go into our Sun ONE Studio product.
That’s there today. What we’re doing in addition to that is some of the things that Rich alluded to, which was the Project
Relator. That’s the ability to take something like a rich client and pick any of your favorite design tools to create sort
of a graphic: Adobe, Macromedia, Illustrator. It allows you to take that [tool] and essentially create hot spots. Say you
designed a game, for instance, and you created an image map of a game that you wanted to create hot spots on that would relate
to an action. What Relator allows you to do is create the hot spots and then tie that to pieces of Java code on the back end
that, when you mouse over it or you click on it, then invokes an EJB or does whatever action you’ve specified on the back
end. So that’s one thing that we’re doing to bring together the front-end client to something on the back end.
The other thing that we’re doing -- which wasn’t part of the announcements -- we’re actually showing on the show floor something
called Javon. The whole goal there is to tie together the front-end client with the back end, to a J2EE type of server. It
has two pieces: There’s a run-time component, which is the APIs, and the thing that does the messaging, which is very thin,
very lightweight, which is exactly what you want. Then there’s also a set of wizards and design sheets that are part of Studio.
The idea is to create a thin-client piece and then push a lot of the business logic and applications back to the server.
InfoWorld: You are trying to change the way developers build and deploy enterprise apps for mobile devices, but do you think
traditional enterprise app vendors have got it yet?
Green: Well, I don’t want to sound negative, but mostly no. I think they have it in their heads. They see what’s coming. But
most of their products are still very coarse-grained services-based stuff: a big J2EE app talking to a big J2EE app.
INTERVIEW
