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Kas Thomas

Sun to pursue Java-less Java?

29-Feb-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Web Content Management, Implementation, Industry Standards,

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, speaking at the SugarCRM Customer and Developer Conference earlier this month, made a pronouncement that went largely unnoticed by industry pundits. "I think what you'll see from Sun," Schwartz remarked, "is that we're just going to take the 'J' off the 'JVM' and just make it a 'VM'."

Wait. Roll the tape back. Did Schwartz just say that he wants to factor Java out of the JVM?

If so, it could have important ramifications for the Web CMS and Portal marketplaces in particular.

At first blush, it sounds like a radical notion. But it's not. Microsoft pioneered the idea of a language-neutral virtual machine years ago with its Common Language Infrastructure specification, also known as ECMA-335. The CLI spec provides the basis for the .NET virtual machine (which does indeed support multiple languages).

The Java community's comeback is something called the Da Vinci Machine project, which has an explicit goal of "extending the JVM with first-class architectural support for languages other than Java, especially dynamic languages."

So now Sun wants to out-dot-NET dot-NET. But that's something Sun could have attempted years ago. Why do it now? No doubt the groundswell of interest in dynamic languages (Ruby, Perl, Python, Groovy, and so on), driven by Web 2.0, has awakened Sun to the realization that programmers now want the best of both worlds: They want the rapid development that dynamic languages afford, yet they also want the very real benefits (in terms of thread management, garbage collection, security sandboxing, memory management, platform independence) of running inside a VM.

But still, why would Sun want to go in the direction of a Java-less JVM if it didn't have to?

It turns out there's an elephant in the room, and its name is Adobe. It's no secret that Flex (Adobe's answer to Web 2.0 development) is gaining traction every day, and Flex outputs bytecode for the Adobe VM. Close observers of the Mozilla ecosystem have known for a while that Adobe's VM (a.k.a. Tamarin) will soon be an integral part of Firefox. And lest there be any doubt about what's going on, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch admitted at an industry event last Monday that Adobe is working on a project to allow C, C++, and other languages to run atop the AVM. Let's recap: Adobe is in the "Java-less" VM business. Big time.

As it turns out, the AVM is actually fairly mature (it has powered several generations of Flash), not to mention fast (it supports just-in-time compilation), and it already powers a sizable percentage of the world's (ahem) flashiest Web 2.0 applications. It will soon be built into Firefox's scripting engine, and if Adobe has its way, it will be on every PC user's AIR-conditioned desktop faster than you can say "Silverlight."

Sun clearly has its work cut out for it, if it wants to remain relevant in the VM wars.

Regardless, unshackling Java from the JVM (or vice-versa) can only be A Good Thing in the long run. It means programmers will (at last) be free to take a best-of-breed approach in choosing the right language for the job. (Bytecode, after all, is bytecode. Who cares how you produce it?) Most of all, it will mean rapid application development, finally, for server apps that will run on the JVM, something most of us have been wanting since 1995.

Why does all this matter for the tools we follow? Well, we've been seeing a long-term trend among packaged applications away from lighter languages towards more "enterprise-ready" Java (c.f., Nuxeo, Interwoven, Vignette, et. al.). But this transition has been a difficult one for vendors and customers alike. Perhaps you'll see a renewed investment in dynamic languages across various content technologies. We'll be watching.