September is shaping up to be a veritable standards bonanza. Sun Microsystems Inc is expected to announce a route for standardizing its Embedded Java work and The Open Group is set to emerge from the holding pattern (some might say nose dive) it’s been in for a year or more (see separate story). The two may also be related. Hewlett-Packard Co appears to be angling for Sun to use a pared-down Open Group as the vehicle for the specification, testing and branding of Embedded Java. Earlier this year HP won a slew of companies representing the majority of embedded system software industry – plus Microsoft Corp Windows CE – for the clean-room Java VM it’s developed specifically for the embedded systems industry. In March Sun and HP got into a spat over HP’s sub-setting of Java, while HP called for the ending of Sun’s stewardship of core Java APIs and virtual machine standardization which is being conducted through the International Standards Organization. HP later toned down its criticism of Sun, anticipating the creation of open, universally accepted specifications for the use of [the] Java language in embedded systems (CI No 3,373). Sun hasn’t yet disclosed a process for standardizing Embedded Java and other extensions such as real-time work, but by May there was even talk of the two companies combining their Embedded Java work.
