By William Fellows
Six months after joining Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java Community Source Program, the UK’s Tao Group will shortly be able stand up and count its clean-room Java JBC Engine as an official, bona fide, authorized and certified implementation of Sun’s JVM. JBC Engine doesn’t use Sun’s source code, nor has Tao licensed JavaOS for instance, but chairman Francis Charig says many of the deals it is now closing wouldn’t have been possible had it not taken a community source license.
This week Tao made public the first of its deals in the set-top market, announcing that JBC Engine will ship on LSI Logic set-top reference boxes for running Embedded Java and Personal Java applications. LSI offers a single-chip solution for set-top manufacturers. Tao claims to have deals with as many as six set- top companies under wraps, and others with consumer electronics manufacturers making web-enabled phones, cameras and other digital devices. Its relationship with JVC has already garnered some attention.
The JVM is available standalone or for use with its Elate real- time operating system. Charig believes there’s a sea-change of attitude towards Java among vendors targeting the European set- top market now that Sun has begun to work on extensions to Java for digital video broadcasting. The European set-top market is reckoned to be more advanced than the US market at this point. Charig, who freely admits that Tao was dying until Sun brought out Java, expects a revenue stream from royalties on the sale of set-top and consumer products to kick in next year, or six to nine months after product are announced.
Bringing its JVM in line with Sun’s specification means Charig’s programmers will no longer have to spend 90% of their time developing the JBC Engine spec. Tao touts its portable Java libraries which mean application execute identically on different microprocessors. It is avoiding the Caffeine benchmarks because its says they test for only one small part of JVM performance and have little or nothing to do with Java application execution in real-world settings.
Charig says Tao is not involved in the Sun and IBM Corp-lead group developing real-time extensions to Java under the community model because it agrees with all that they are doing. Moreover he doesn’t believe the Hewlett-Packard Co and Microsoft Corp-driven Java Consortium will offer much of a threat to Sun because what matters is the consumer and mobile market where the big name vendors are, and they are in the Sun camp.
