Report from Software Development '96 (Or Was It the Java Show?)
Java and cross-platform development are big winners at industry showcase
Some 15,000 developers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT professionals
pored over hundreds of new software applications at the recently concluded
Software Development show held in San Francisco. It was clear from the moment
you walked onto the show floor that the world has come to Java. Booth after
booth was offering new apps tied in to the hottest development language
breakthrough to hit the industry in years.
As might be imagined in this scenario, the SunSoft booth was mobbed all
day. The Mountain View, CA-based vendor chose this showcase to bill itself
as "the Internet software company" by unleashing a product blitz
of eight new releases, all intended to back up its claim that it is the
leader in business Internet computing. Of particular interest to many in
attendance was SunSoft's Java Workshop 1.0, a completely integrated Java
development environment that supports both Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows
platforms. A beta version is available free on the Web at http://www.sun.com/developer-products/
and will ship at $295 per user in mid-April.
If Java was the big hit, the most important trend to be observed was cross-platform
development. A majority of the exhibitors at the show are also seen at UniForum
and other Unix shows, and application development tools for porting Windows
NT to Unix were on display everywhere.
The concept of NT and Unix coexistence was much in force. Predictably, it
was Microsoft that got much of the credit for this from the audience, since
Microsoft's low-cost tools that are now available to developers are gaining
great favor. "NT should be the development platform for everyone,"
said Jean Blackwell, vice president of marketing and sales at Bristol Technologies
of Ridgefield, CT. "Then developers can use tools like ours to port
to Unix or OpenVMS or to other platforms." The idea of a single proprietary
control over source code was less of an issue to Blackwell than was the
increase in developer productivity gained by writing for one platform and
using tools to port to others.
While the idea of an NT-centric world for developers was easy to find, it
was not a universally held belief. Paul Fillinich, district manager at Lucent
Technologies (the new name for AT&T's Software Solutions Group), was
eager to point out that the power was still with Unix, especially for developers
working on applications that involve graphics. His Murray Hill, NJ-based
company's latest product, RIO Designer for Unix, will be ready soon. The
product is set to take advantage of the falling cost of high-end machines
that have advanced graphics capabilities (such as those from Sun and Silicon
Graphics) by providing these machines with more affordable 3-D applications.
At the end of the day, though, it was still the Java show. "It's a
remarkable phenomenon," said Derek Lambert, president of Imperial Software
in the U.K. "Two things spring to mind--first, that Java is going to
be the enabler of animation on the Web and second, that Java is the clear
path to distributed computing that developers had not found before. From
applets will come global distributed client/server, and if you're not on
the Java bandwagon you're not going to be competitive."
Lambert went on to make an observation that summed up the importance of
Java at this event: "The industry is bored. It's ready for a new thrust
that means something--not like Windows 95--but something that is truly new
and revolutionary. That's Java."