Green: It's [about] motivating compatibility, I’d like not to say it’s [about] control. It’s not like we have anybody in a headlock or tearing their [hair] out. But certainly in my speech [at JavaOne], I really tried to highlight the value of compatibility. Not from a control perspective but from the virtues it brings in terms of the Java ecosystem and building a bigger business and a bigger world model.
InfoWorld: Tell me about Sun's internal J2ME program, JavaFirst.
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.
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