From the Editors: Business as usual at the JCP
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By SD Times News Team
July 1, 2008 —
Ever since Sun formed the Java Community Process in 1998, other companies have complained that the Silicon Valley company excessively controls Java Specification Requests. Indeed, SD Times has covered many instances in which other companies have urged Sun to play nice and to run the JCP more democratically.
However, there’s no reason for Sun to do so. Java, after all, is Sun’s technology and a core part of its business strategy. Maintaining control over Java’s present and future is essential to Sun’s market position. The JCP is Sun’s sandbox. Other companies can join the JCP or they can create technologies that work with Java, but they do so on Sun’s terms.
Sun with Java is no different than Microsoft with .NET or Apple with the iPhone. That most, if not all, JCP staff are Sun employees should make it very clear: It’s Sun’s baby, it’s Sun’s vision and it’s Sun’s direction.
Take the latest outbreak, regarding the proposed JSR 277 Java Module System, which seeks to extend the existing Java Archive systems with a better packing scheme for applications and resources. Critics contend that there’s a perfectly good modular-deployment system already available from the OSGi Alliance and that Sun is going out of its way to ensure that JSR 277 is incompatible with OSGi.
Is that what Sun’s up to? It’s hard to know whether JSR 277 and OSGi will ultimately be incompatible. We’re not sure if JSR 277’s scheme is better or worse than OSGi—it’s too soon to tell. As for its motivation, the company claims that the development of JSR 277 will be transparent and that Sun will consider feedback from the outside world.
What’s going to happen with JSR 277? We don’t know. However, we support Sun’s right to develop specifications in the way that it sees best. The Java Community Process isn’t really a community; that was never its intent. It’s a way for Sun to encourage its partners to collaborate with it on the Sun specs. But the decision about what to put in Java ultimately lies with Sun. Let’s hope the company’s spec leads decide wisely.
Free apps won’t help the iPhone
Although it’s true that Steve Jobs has positioned iPhone to become synonymous with “mobile application deployment platform,” we’re not sure it’s all that much—yet. The first clue came during his keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June, when Jobs announced that roughly three out of four applications that would be available at the App Store’s July launch would be free, as in beer.
This says to us that although developers are interested in the iPhone as a platform, they do not expect it to make any money for them. We rather suspect that this first wave of native software is a lot like the collection of widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard: an interesting display of programming talent that will become increasingly less useful with every update to the underlying operating system.
It’s clear Apple will spend a lot of money on the App Store’s infrastructure, since the company won’t be collecting dime one from three out of four developers for hosting and provisioning. Granted, that’s also a lot of money that won’t be spent to support charging credit cards at US$3.95 a pop, or some similarly low price that does little to offset the actual cost of sales.
Of course, only time will tell how this plays out. But we have to wonder if Apple is setting the stage for world domination, or just building another library of ho-hum freeware. What we’re waiting for are the enterprise-class applications, not for a bunch of free widgets, games and utilities. Then, and only then, will the iPhone become a real platform.
Related Search Term(s): Java, mobile development, Apple, Sun
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