Three-year-old Java still misunderstood

By Chris Nerney
Network World, 4/20/98

Java guru Ted Young was giving a talk in February to network professionals working for Federal Department of Energy subcontractors when one attendee asked if the programming language could work on his enterprise.

"This guy said his company had two of everything on its network," said Young, who is president of Advanced Web Technologies Corp., a Java training and outsourcing firm in New York. "I explained that Java was designed to run on multiple platforms. After my speech he came up to me and said, `I didn't know Java could do that.' "

It is surprising that Java is still so misunderstood. After all, it has been three years since Sun Microsystems, Inc. introduced Java as the programming language and platform that would transform how networks run. Since then, Sun and its partners in the Java alliance - notably IBM and Oracle Corp. - have gone to great lengths to educate the IT world about Java's virtues, sponsoring conferences and setting up Web sites where developers can get a big-picture view of Java or trade coding tips.

The effort has paid off, resulting in an intense level of interest in Java and a growth in the number of Java programmers, now estimated by Sun to be more than 800,000.

But Young and a number of other independent systems integrators interviewed by Network World said that despite the concerted effort to enlighten the market, many IT professionals still lack a fundamental understanding of Java. "I'm always surprised by how basic many of the questions are," Young said.

"It's amazing how little people know about it," said Ron Repking, an integration consultant and owner of ISA Services, Inc., of Chicago. "I frequently encounter two big misconceptions about Java. One is that you can't build real large-scale systems with it. People think of it more as something they can do cool things with on the Web. They don't realize the richness of all the APIs."

"The second is that there's no way to run Java unless you're in a Web-type environment, which is completely untrue," Repking said, citing the development of server-side applets, or "servlets," as well as server-based applications.

Many misconceptions about Java "come from people having old information," said Vlad Kroutik of Cambridge Technology Partners, Inc. (CTP), in Cambridge, Mass.

"Many IT professionals aren't keeping up with how fast Java is unfolding," Kroutik said. For example, people often argue that Microsoft Corp.'s VisualBasic Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a tool for building applications using the VisualBasic scripting language, is "far superior to Java IDEs because it's been on the market for five years," he said.

"That may have been true a year ago, but today there are four or five industry standard-class IDEs on the market for Java," Kroutik said.