Opening its annual JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, California, Sun claimed there have been 65 million downloads of Java to desktop PCs, that the market of Java-enabled handsets runs to 350 million devices, and that Java creates a market of $110bn in related IT spending.
Company president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz, regaling JavaOne with the stats, added the total number of Java developers had grown by 30% to four million since June 2003.
The desktop’s coming back. Java is driving a big part of that evolution, Schwartz said of the PC.
He added clients are evolving beyond the PC, with games and ring tones written in Java for download and execution on mobile devices set to become a huge, addressable market.
The evolution of the client is beginning to bubble back not with web services that terminate with a browser, but with a real rich client, Schwartz said. Once consumers latch on the services spending $3 a ring tones, they tell their friends and this becomes a flywheel.
Schwartz, ever the visionary, went on to predict the next major platform after cell pones, for Java applications would be automotive. Have you noticed them putting flat panel displays in seats? You think they won’t talk to the network? That’s a captive industry. Why not explore that market opportunity, Schwartz said.
Having made the big pitch, Sun proceeded to launch products, platforms and pricing SKUs it expects will be adopted by Java developers tackling these new markets.
A year after it was first demonstrated, Sun launched Java Studio Creator, a drag-and-drop development environment for web-based Java applications and available with a subscription to Sun’s Developer Network for $99 per developer, or under promotion for $49.95 with tutorials, source code and white papers for JavaOne attendees.
Beta two of the latest Java Standard Edition (J2SE), formerly Project Tiger, was launched, as version 5.0, as Sun drops the previous 1.x naming convention. Updates include generics enumerated types, metadata and autoboxing to help speed development time, offer faster start-up time and automatic tuning.
The next Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), version 5.0 instead of 1.5, was also announced with a design goal simplifying common development scenarios. Proposed use of Java Specification Request (JSR) 175 will help developers write components such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) more easily, Java Server Faces (JSF) already used in Java Studio Creator, and Java Standard Tag Libraries.
Sun also continued its move towards subscriptions, announcing availability of a w1100z Opteron workstation running Solaris x86 with Java Studio Enterprise for $1,499 per year. Sun claimed the bundle is valued over $9,000.
The company is also preparing to re-enter the auction arena, making Sun tools, hardware and services available in a bidding environment to find the price developers are willing to pay for subscriptions. Sun last used auctions to shift servers on eBay.
Software executive vice president John Loiacono said auctions would let Sun discover it was been undercharging customers, over charging customers or that it was in the ballpark.
