The Tools and the Trade: A Conversation with James Gosling

Do you want to resolve any lingering misconceptions about Sun's settlement with Microsoft?

We've been in litigation with Microsoft for many years and won every court case. When they offered us a huge pile of cash, we took it. We won big and got a pile of cash to invest in future projects. Concluding the Microsoft lawsuit was good for Sun, good for the industry, and good for the Java technology community.

Let me address some concerns. First of all, the settlement has not affected our Java technology strategy. We're not shifting strategy at all as a result of it -- the biggest effect is that those of us who were involved in litigation are no longer distracted by it anymore. It is true that, as part of the settlement, we signed up for Microsoft's Communications Protocol Program, but this in no way locks Sun or Sun customers into interoperating with any Microsoft system on Microsoft's strict terms. Right now, most of our interoperability is achieved through reverse engineering. We have the option, entirely at our discretion, to access Microsoft's specifications through the collaboration agreement. But before we do so, on a case-by-case basis, we will analyze the business case and the entanglements that such access implies, which are principally confidentiality and royalties.

Right now, the vast majority of the software that Sun produces has free and open specifications and we provide the implementations of a large and growing fraction of it as open source. We aren't going to slow down our involvement in the open source community. We have thus far launched no projects that will access any Microsoft specifications under the agreement -- we simply have the option to, if we decide that the benefits outweigh the costs.

As I've said, we have not sold our soul. We haven't turned into mindless lap dogs overnight. We've had a lot of experience with Microsoft over the years.

Also, in case anyone still believes that Rich Green "resigned in disgust," let me clear that up. Rich Green was my boss, and I can promise you that he left for entirely personal reasons that had nothing to do with the Microsoft settlement. Rich was one of the people who put this agreement together. And one reason he stayed so long was that he wanted to do the right thing for the community. The agreement was something that he could feel proud of. Few people understand how draining the litigation was. I mean, Rich, in particular, was nearly exhausted by the time-consuming legal process, as were many others. We were all bound and determined to carry it through to a successful conclusion. Now, thankfully, we're done.

You moved, in the fall of 2003, to Sun's developer platforms group as CTO and have been focusing on tools.

My goal is to make Sun's tools the best, most advanced, and most interesting out there. Though we have a lot of good stuff now, the opportunities are rich. Tools are where we have the most to do vis-a-vis Microsoft.

Our Java tools strategy takes two major directions. One is to make the process of software development as easy and approachable as possible for the largest number of developers. For quite a while, Java technology developers have been able to build extremely sophisticated applications, but the straight forward stuff was often more complex than it needed to be, especially when compared with Microsoft's Visual Studio, where people could slap together something rather quickly. I hasten to add that all of the Microsoft solutions have a huge problem of scale when it comes to turning them into truly enterprise-size applications.

One major thrust is ease of development. And we're excited about Java Studio Creator, which is centered around doing rapid development of applications that are based on the Web. We've tied together web access with back-end beta sources, either as databases or web services.

The other major direction has been high-end sophisticated tools for people doing large-scale enterprise applications, like Java Studio Enterprise.

The NetBeans community has released NetBeans 3.6, a development framework which is important to Sun.

NetBeans 3.6 is an excellent IDE itself, but it's also the underpinnings of all the higher level IDEs, the underpinnings of both Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise. There is also a mobile edition for developing software for the cell phone. And a number of people have built on top of NetBeans. In the 3.6 release, a huge amount of work went into things like performance, workflow, and reliability. It's really great. It's setting the stage for NetBeans 4.0, which you can get early-access copies of now. It changes the whole way that project management works. In particular, Ant, a tool that most IDEs use to integrate with, is included in 3.6. NetBeans 4.0 goes one step further -- it's not just integrated with Ant. It really is wrapped around Ant -- Ant provides the spiritual center of the build process.

If you look under the hood at the implementation of NetBeans, you'll find that, just like any other Java application, it is a large collection of classes. These classes can be used outside of NetBeans to provide a framework for general desktop applications. The platform APIs include extensive facilities built on top of Swing to do window, action, toolbar, and menu management. There is also an abstract file system that allows things like CVS (Concurrent Versions System) repositories and FTP sites to be viewed as file systems. There's a whole framework for wizards, and a facility for managing and storing settings. My personal favorite is the AutoUpdate module that allows applications (at the direction of users through plugin manager UI) to be extended by installing plugins, and to handle automatic updating when new versions appear.

Taken together, these dramatically simplify the construction of sophisticated desktop applications.

Where does Jackpot, your research project, fit in?

Bits and pieces of Jackpot are finding their way into products. Jackpot is based on manipulating programs as semantic models rather than as text. As time passes, more and more of the things we learned there will show up in NetBeans.

You have said that you use Apple OS X every day and work with people from Apple all the time, and that their commitment to Java technology compatibility is real. Apple is holding their "Apple Worldwide Developers Conference" event across the street from the 2004 JavaOne Conference. Do you want to expand on this?

I think it's a pretty interesting alignment of planets that these two Conferences are going to be right together. These communities share a lot, certainly a lot of Apple developers are Java technology developers, and vice versa.

And you use Apple's OS X every day?

Absolutely -- everyday. My main machine has been a Mac Powerbook ever since OS 10 came in.

You were recently in Hyderabad, India, on May 20 and 21, 2004, for Sun Tech Days. What was it like?

It was great. I met with lots of Java technology developers who were doing lots of cool projects. India has a lively software community and about half of the 600,000 developers there develop in the Java language. There were more than 2,400 developers present at the event, titled "Turning Ideas into Innovation." They are a very innovative bunch. The Indian press has proclaimed Sun Tech Days as the "Premier Developer Conference" in India.

My personal high point was when my hosts brought out a cake and almost 3,000 people sang happy birthday to me. It was overwhelming!

Can you give us a sneak preview of the 2004 JavaOne Conference?

I'm excited about the T-shirt hurling contest. That should be a lot of fun. The three teams who will be finalists are going to be doing their thing, spread across three days. We haven't decided how to judge it. I'll be doing an interesting Real-Time demo. We'll be showing the latest NetBeans stuff, and a demo of the next version of Java Studio Creator.

Anything else that you would like to say to our audience of developers?

Have fun!

James Gosling's Weblog
James Gosling Biography
James Gosling on NetBeans
NetBeans
NetBeans 3.6 IDE Released
NetBeans 4.0 Release Plans
Sun Java Studio Creator
Sun Java Studio Enterprise
Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad