Java under the microscope
Published: 04 Jul 2005 20:00 BST
You started Green as just a project for consumer electronics, though?
When we originally started thinking about it, we spent a lot of time talking to people in all kinds or areas. We saw similar things happening in consumer electronics and the emerging mobile phone world and embedded control systems. We talked to people who made elevators, locomotives, lighting control systems and stuff in automobiles. We also talked to [developers of] VCRs and televisions. In the first round, the Green project, we decided we wanted to do a prototype. We had to focus. Largely because it was more entertaining, we picked consumer electronics.
Lots of people thought it was interesting, but then we asked, is there some way we can turn this into something that can support itself? At about that time, Time Warner came out with their full-services network RFP (request for proposals). It was pretty much our fantasy — networking to the home, voice over network, video over network, interactive content. It was, "Yes! This is what we want, what we're working towards." We jumped in.
This was essentially the early days of interactive TV?
Yeah. It was a pretty visionary proposal. There were a lot of people who said, "We gotta be that too."
The thing with Time Warner got really strange for a wide variety of reasons, and we ended up losing that bid. In retrospect, I'm glad we ended up losing (to Silicon Graphics). SGI went and spent unbelievable amounts of money trying to do this and got no money to help support it.
Did you conceive of Java as something for this narrow domain or as something that might splash all over the computing industry?
It wasn't so much that we planned to splash across the industry. What happened was we looked at all these industries and they were doing similar things at some gut level. Everyone was building systems that had digital controllers in them. But there are huge interoperability problems. It was a matter of observation to notice that all these things were going to get unified. You're standing outside a demolition derby and you notice all the cars are pointed toward the centre of the arena and they're going to smack.
So Java solved some interoperability problems. But Microsoft went its own way with .NET, which essentially created a higher-level interoperability problem. Is there a way to merge .NET and Java into one technology?
In some sense that's what Web services are. They're a bridge. But you can't weld things together when they don't want to be welded together. Microsoft has explicit policies of being different. They like to be different. They were actually very upstanding, lovely members of the Java community for six months or a year, then they decided that was a bad idea.
Was that 1995 or 1996?
That would be 1996, I guess. But working together means you have to like working together. For Microsoft, that's been a long educational process. They don't seem to like it. They seem to be getting closer. We do an awful lot to work with them, but it's a little at more arm's length. We do [interfaces] in common, Web services, interoperability.
Could you feed programs written for .NET in C# into a Java virtual machine?
The only serious divide is they have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode.
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