Netscape Communications Corp’s support of the Java language was greeted with relief by SunWorld attendees, who now regard Java as a done deal that would otherwise have languished as an interesting backroom technology. Java – previously known as Green and Oak, was a technology looking for a purpose until the explosion of the World Wide Web on the Internet suggested a focus. Sun Microsystems Inc originally thought that interactive television would be its first application, with the failed First Person initiative. Trying to position Java against other technologies is difficult: although billed by Sun’s chief information officer Bill Raduchel as a safe version of C++ without the guns, knives or clubs, Java has characteristics in common with Smalltalk and Pascal, and with powerful scripting languages such as Perl, Grow and TCL. None of these are directly comparable, however, and TCL tool command scripting language developer John Osterhaut, who also works at Sun, is apparently a Java fan. C and C++ come in for some stringent criticism from Java masterminds James Gosling and Henry McGilton in a White Paper on the new language. C and C++, say the authors, have evolved into a collection of overlapping features, providing too many ways to say the same thing. Java omits C++ features such as operator overloading, multiple inheritance and extensive automatic coercions, but adds object-oriented extensions similar to those found in Objective C. The biggest difference from C is that Java has a pointer model that eliminates the possibility of overwriting memory and corrupting data, using true arrays instead of pointer arithmetic. Eliminating such features obviously affects performance, as does the fact that Java is an interpreted language, as are Smalltalk and TCL. But the authors claim to have hit an attractive middle ground between very high-level and portable but slow scripting languages and the very fast but non-portable and unreliable compiled languages. Its exact relationship between other network-aware technologies currently emerging onto the Web, such as Kaleida Labs Inc’s ScriptX and Silicon Graphics Inc’s Virtual Reality Modeling Language is also hard to fathom. Virtual Reality Modeling Language creators Tom Parisi and Mark Pesce of San Francisco-based Intervista Software Inc say that they are interested in using Java as the extension language for the Silicon Graphics one. Finally, one ex-Sun developer, pointing to the involvement of James Gosling in the Java project – Gosling was responsible for Sun’s Network Extensible Windowing System, which lost the de facto standards battle with X Window, claimed that Java is the Windowing System reborn.
