SAN FRANCISCO (06/01/2000) - Sun Microsystems Inc. unleashed a flurry of minor Java announcements this week as it starts to crank up the hype around the development platform in advance of next week's 2000 Worldwide Java Developer Conference.
The company said yesterday that Oracle Corp. has licensed its Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition for use in its database, application server, development tools, and other software products. Sun also said yesterday that CoreCommerce will develop and deploy its business-to-business commerce software using Sun's Java platform.
Today, Sun announced the appointment of executive committee members for its Java Community Process (JCP), which is developing specifications for the programming language.
Next week's conference, which Sun officials estimate will draw more than 20,000 people, comes at a time when the Java programming language is gaining more and more popularity with developers and businesses building enterprise applications, Larry Perlstein, a research director with Gartner Group Inc., said today.
"We continue to see growing support for the (Java) platform," Perlstein said.
"More and more companies, software vendors and enterprises are announcing support for J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition)."
In fact, since it began shipping last December, J2EE has been licensed by several large suppliers of computer software and hardware, including Bea Systems Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., and Bluestone Software Inc.
Sun has also seen the JCP program gain in popularity, as more companies step forward to share in the responsibility for development of the Java platform, Perlstein said.
"It's a tribute to the way Sun has maintained control of the technology and its good relationships with its partners," he said.
Sun recently made changes to the JCP program in order to quell concerns among some Java customers that they were not competing on a level playing field.
The executive committee members for Sun's JCP program will include representatives from Bea, Oracle, Novell Inc., IBM Corp., and Hewlett-Packard Co. The committee members will begin service June 19, Sun said in a statement.
The members will share with Sun responsibilities for selecting and approving Java specification requests.
Sun, in Palo Alto, California, can be reached at +1-650-960-1300 or at http://www.sun.com/. ECMA can be contacted at +41-22-849-6000, or at http://www.ecma.ch/.Oracle, in Redwood Shores, California, can be reached at +1-650-506-7000 or via the Internet at http://www.oracle.com/. CoreCommerce can be reached at +1-212-329-4366, or at http://www.corecommerce.com/.