News

Sun’s Schwartz boosts Java ubiquity at JavaOne

• By Rich Seeley
• June 29, 2004

Java ubiquity leading to developer creativity and business opportunity was the keynote theme as Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, addressed the opening session of JavaOne in San Francisco on Monday.

In a statistics packed talk, he noted that there have been 100 million downloads of the Java developers toolkit by coders working in a $100 billion annual global market for Java technology. Beyond the more traditional J2EE server market for business applications, Schwartz pointed to an accelerating deployment of Java apps in cell phones, automobiles and medical devices, as well as toys and games.

Many of the applications, he said, are in areas "we never could have imagined."

Count Java ringtones among things not imagined. Schwartz noted that the annual market for ringtones downloaded to cell phones is estimated at $3.5 billion as people, especially young consumers, pay to have distinctive musical samplings play when they get a phone call. In another example of the growing Java market, he said the mobile game market is $3 billion per year.

On the more serious side, he demonstrated a Java-based medical wireless device that a patient can wear, allowing a physician to monitor heart rate and other vital signs without requiring an office or hospital visit.

"This economy is growing at breakneck speed," Schwartz told his audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and worldwide via Webcast, which this reporter watched. Sun's president said it is fulfilling the original vision of Sun's founders that eventually "everything and everybody will be connected to the network."

Noting that such "ubiquity yields opportunity," he touted the traditional Java benefits of "write once, run anywhere," noting that with hundreds of millions of Java applications being written by a limited pool of Java programmers, code reusability and device compatibility are a must.