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Sun celebrates 10 years of Java with a bash
About 2,500 Java developers from across India have gathered in India's high tech capital in Bangalore.
About 2,500 Java developers from across India have gathered in India's high tech capital in Bangalore to mark the 10th anniversary of the collaborative platform that revolutionised enterprise computing, web services and open source among other domains.
Sun Microsystems, which pioneered Java technology, rolled out the India edition of the 'Sun Tech Days 2005' in association with its partners Oracle and SAP to hail the contribution of the Indian developer community to the proliferation of the Java platform and its brand worldwide.
"India ranks next only to the US in developing products, applications and solutions around Java for the global market, with its 320,000-strong developer community breathing the technology day in and day out to push the frontiers of innovation," Sun's vice president for Java developer platform & strategy, Jeff Jackson, said on Thursday on the sidelines of the two-day bash.
Unwinding from hectic schedules and writing source code, the young developers in their 20s and 30s are being treated at the tech show to the latest developments on the Java front and Sun's vision to stay ahead with its next-generation Java architecture Mustang.
"The future of Java lies in being more collaborative, competitive and compatible to exploit the full potential of its open standards and multiply its applications in diverse verticals with new technology, training and tools," Jackson said.
With 28 per cent of Indian Java developers, programmers and system integrators engaged in IT services, 26 per cent as independent software vendors (ISVs), 10 per cent in research-cum-academia, eight percent in the government sector, the rest of the community (28 per cent) is involved in developing applications for the enterprise sector across verticals.
"We understand the pressure developers face to shorten the time it takes to develop innovative and robust solutions. Annual events like these offer the developer community (opportunities) to help equip them with the latest open software technologies and architectures," said Sun's director for technology outreach Matt Thompson.
Java, originally code named Oak, was developed by Sun as part its green project in the 1990s, with a three-member team comprising Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan and James Gosling.
The team was told to find out what the "next wave" of computing would be and how to fine-tune it. After five years of research and development, Sun released the first version of Java in 1995.
Though Sun tried to make Java applicable to home appliances and cable TV initially, the response was not encouraging from the end-users. The advent of Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) made the company redesign the platform to suit the needs of the times.
According to Sun India marketing director KP Unnikrishnan, one can experience Java on Sony Ericsson and Reliance CDMA mobile phones, palm PDAs, PCs and a slew of websites.
