Product Example: The Rocky Road that Led to Java

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People often imagine that the process of invention is fluid and linear. A light bulb goes off in someone's mind, the idea goes onto a "drawing board" where it is refined, and then a product is built and shipped to enthusiastic throngs of customers.

The reality usually bears little resemblance to this image. The extraordinary case of the Java™ software platform provides an example of the rocky and convoluted road technological innovation often follows.

• One might suppose that this is the way it all happened: James Gosling and his team invented Java technology in the mid 1990s, and that Sun, knowing it had a technology as revolutionary as the Gutenberg press on its hands, quickly productized and marketed Gosling's invention. The rest is history, with the Java platform quickly becoming the most widely and enthusiastically adopted software technology of all time.
  
  
• The reality is far less simple and far more interesting. Java actually had many different "inventors," many different incarnations, and several near-death experiences along the way. The path from concept to product led it through multiple organizations, including Sun Labs; and the people who influenced its development came from within Sun Labs, from other groups at Sun, and from outside Sun.
  
  
• In 1991, James Gosling and his research team were working on "Green," a project funded by Sun Labs, which was doing early development work on an object-oriented programming language. "Things looked promising," according to Mr. Gosling, so in 1992 Sun merged the Green team into a new organization called "First Person," which was developing technologies that could make it easier and more efficient to build small, networkable software applications for consumer electronics products.

At the same time, Sun Labs was partially funding a project called "Self," which was developing dynamic compilation technology. The Self project, led by Dave Ungar, was working on virtual machine technology that provided a layer of abstraction for developers, enabling them to write programs that could run on multiple operating systems.

By 1992, First Person was running into difficulties. Although the group had developed several interesting and promising new technologies, it was discovering that its target market--cable and telecom companies--was not very receptive to consumer-oriented, Internet-related technology. "They simply weren't ready to understand what we were doing, and I suppose we weren't ready to understand their issues," said Dr. Gosling. Unable to secure funding for further research, the group began to dissolve, its pieces offered for sale to other technology companies.

Gosling decided at that time to pursue a new project focused on further development of his object-oriented programming language. He started the "Live Oak" project, which combined his previous work with some of the new technologies developed at First Person, as well as technologies developed as part of the Self project.

According to Gosling, there was no single innovation that led to Java technology. "Object-oriented programming languages have been around for many years; we tried to improve on what was available," he said. "Virtual machine technology has been around for more than 15 years; we tried to make it better. We weren't focused on creating some kind of breakthrough. We were trying to make life easier for developers."

Of course, the creation of the Java programming language did entail a number of significant innovations, particularly in its class verifier, memory management, and garbage collection capabilities. "We weren't working with new ideas, but the way we applied the ideas was new," Gosling said. And what does the moment of innovation feel like? He said he experiences it not as a spark of inspiration but rather as a reduction in frustration. "It's not like a light bulb goes off and suddenly it all comes together," he said. "For me, it's more a matter of making annoyances go away, one by one. I focus on something that I find irritating and try to fix it."

In 1995, Sun introduced the concept of Java technology and its "Write Once, Run Anywhere" capability; in 1996, the first Java technology-based product was released, the Java™ Development Kit (JDK) 1.0. The toolkit, available as a free download on the Internet, was snapped up by thousands of eager programmers. The publicity surrounding the release of the JDK was almost unprecedented in the annals of Silicon Valley, comparable only to the release of Netscape's Web browser. Literally thousands of articles were written about the new technology in the first few months after its release. Soon 83,000 Web pages had incorporated Java technology, and hundreds of thousands of developers were learning the Java programming language. "I call it a fundamental break in the history of technology," wrote George Gilder of Java in Forbes ASAP. "Almost overnight, the CPU and its software have become peripheral; the network, central."

Yet the JDK was only the tip of the iceberg for Java technology products. Sun formed a separate product division called JavaSoft™, beginning the quest of establishing Java technology as a complete software platform, capable of supporting virtually any enterprise computing task. JavaBeans™ technology-based components were introduced in 1996, along with Java Media APIs, Java Servlets, and other software based on Java technologies.

In the years from 1996-2001, Sun Labs has continued to provide much of the advanced development work for Java technologies. For example, Sun Labs was instrumental in the development of Java HotSpot™, a high-performance virtual machine implementation that increased performance by an order of magnitude. Sun Labs also developed the technology that became Java Remote Method Invocation, (Java RMI), which enables developers to define remote interfaces for Java servers and clients (so a Java server can invoke Java code running on remote clients and provide a distributed client/server programming architecture).

More recently, Sun Labs created the technology that became the Java KVM, a critical product that brings Java technology to embedded devices. Requiring less than 64KB of memory, Java KVM is designed for high-volume, small-footprint consumer products such as mobile phones, pagers and personal digital assistants that have limited memory, battery life, and processing power.

James Gosling, who now works at Sun Labs, is continuing to improve and enhance Java development tools.

"It is interesting to look back and notice the role personalities and chance and circumstance all played in the evolution of Java," said Jon Kannegaard, Vice President and Deputy Director of Sun Labs, "There were so many times Java could have died or been killed or sold to another company before we realized its potential. And even after Java was established, there were instances when one wrong turn could have easily destroyed everything. When Java was first introduced, we had painted a picture as broad as the Montana skyline of its potential; then we had to scramble to make the dream real before it crumbled. We were all going a mile a minute trying to turn the technologies into products, trying to create the right partnerships and get the community involved in development. So many things could have gone wrong, so many catastrophes were narrowly avoided. Yes, it was hard work and stubbornness and fortitude that kept it going, but there was also an element of magic about it."

Related Links:

• The Java Language: An Overview
• The Source for Java Technology

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