A $100-billion market makes peace with IBM; flirts with open source

The theme of this year's JavaOne conference was the tenth anniversary of Java. Given the circumstances, and rightfully so, Sun Microsystems wasn't shy about tooting its own horn.

The size of the global Java market is now $100 billion; the development community numbers 4.5 million; and this year, the number of Java clients on mobile devices such as cell phones surpassed those on conventional servers or clients.

Sun took the occasion to change Java's branding, dropping the "2" from the three major editions of Java. For instance, the Java 2 Enterprise Edition now becomes Java Enterprise Edition, or Java EE.

Also spotlighted were changes to Java EE addressing long-standing complaints that J2EE was overly complex. Java EE 5 (formerly known as J2EE 1.5) includes features such as Java Server Faces that make it easier to develop Java Server Pages (JSPs); and the EJB 3.0 specification, which includes such things as annotations to simplify building Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs).

The conference keynote included what some saw as an important peace offering from IBM.

IBM recently differed with Sun over the Java Community Process (JCP), and most recently cast a dissenting vote on Java Business Integration, JCP's latest standard.

But IBM WebSphere VP Robert LeBlanc, in his keynote, announced IBM was renewing its Java license for another 10 years, and pledged to continue working through JCP. LeBlanc also announced another important deal sweetener: IBM added Solaris 10 support for its flagship software brands, including DB2, Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere on "x64" (AMD Opteron) platforms.

Open source was in the spotlight as usual—in this case as complement or replacement to formal Java standards. Sun, which manages JCP, has pushed back on the idea of open sourcing all Java technology. For now, JCP accepts open source as one of the development models supported. But the success of the Eclipse Foundation, an outgrowth of an IBM Java development tools framework that has been open-sourced, has prompted many Java vendors to embrace the concept.

Also seen is the rise of open-source alternatives to official Java standards. For instance, Hibernate offers an open-source alternative to Java EE's persistence model that simplifies the process of mapping objects to relational databases. The benefit is Java developers are gaining simpler alternatives; the downside being that many are not formal Java standards. Increasingly, mainstream Java vendors, such as BEA, are building support for alternatives directly into their products. BEA announced it would support several open-source frameworks for building Java Server Pages, alternatives to Java EE.