Java everywhere!

Though the team was hoping to make cable TVs interactive and user-friendly, release of the first graphical browser a year before Java somewhat pre-empted the role the programming language would play in what is now called the webolution.
##CONTINUE##
As James Gosling speaks of Java, the smile on his face reveals the pride of a father watching his son give his first piano concert. Considering the pre-eminent role Java has played in the way devices are accessed in the last decade, Gosling’s sense of pride is all the more justified.

When Gosling and his fellow engineers started to evolve Java, their idea was to make devices ubiquitous and highly interactive. Though the team was hoping to make cable TVs interactive and user-friendly, release of the first graphical browser a year before Java somewhat pre-empted the role the programming language would play in what is now called the webolution.

Ever since, Java – which has grown into a major development platform – has aided the ubiquity of computing, helping its movement from unwieldy desktops to the more on-the-move and incredibly tiny devices. So widespread it is that about 10 billion devices, from smart cards to super computers, are Java-enabled. And the fact that 15 million downloads of Java Developer Kit (JDK) are made across the globe every week serves as a measure of its popularity amongst those who make cool and purposeful technologies.

“We did a lot of the software work that has gone into Amazon’s Kindle (the portable book reading device),” Gosling, who was in Hyderabad to address the large number of Java developers in India during Sun’s technology developers conference last week, said.

“And essentially, Java has remained the framework for much of the applications developed by our community in India and elsewhere. The important thing about Java is the network which enables developers to view all parts of the development as a single, whole thing, which can be tied together to create various applications.

Developers find it workable on almost any kind of environment and so Java is used in a lot of devices,” Gosling explained.

The best thing about Java, according to Gosling, is its invisible presence. Right from ATM and mesh networking machines to switching systems in networks; from web to mobile applications, Java codes are used to run various kinds of software based tasks.

“The Oyster cards, for instance, which are used to ride on London tube trains are Java cards,” Gosling said. “The whole CPU is built around Java and the card, which functions without a battery, has a little antenna embedded in the plastic. It functions with the power of the CPU and can communicate with it from five metres – all this happens in Java environment so seamlessly. oyster cards are also an example of Java’s ability to tie legacy platforms to the new ones.”

Java has also been driving smaller computing devices – called the moats – that have the capability to communicate with each other and form a mesh network around them. Such devices – not bigger than a metal coin – are increasingly deployed in shipping containers to determine temperature and humidity which needs to be determined while carrying fuels and chemicals.

The devices, Gosling explained, can be used in disaster situations to learn about the wind speeds during storms.

“With these devices, it is possible to get a continuous feed of information about humidity and temperature, for instance, from shipping containers without having to tie wires around them. A version of these devices contain strain gages on one side and solar cells on the other, which, if spread around a bridge can tell its health and how best it can withstand high winds,” he explained.

Of course, Java has been finding its way into the next generation devices and is set to play a key role in energy efficiency. Back in November, rock star Neil Young had shown a hybrid car that runs on electricity and natural gas called Linc Volt, which is a 1959 classic Lincoln Continental Mk IV re-powered to run on electricity produced using a natural gas generator.

“The car uses the natural gas piston to keep the charge up while it is on the road,” Gosling said. “We have got Java enabled devices that would monitor performance elements of the vehicle which would be displayed on the touch screen display to the driver. He can learn how good the charge is or how much natural gas is left in the tank.”

What is more, the GPS device on the vehicle would constantly indicate to the driver the location of a natural gas station. As it appears, Gosling and his fellow technologists are quite thrilled by “simple devices that can bring transformation to the lives of people, rather than creating pedestrian enterprise solution.”

Following Adobe and Microsoft, which have made Flash and Silverlight to enable non-programmers to create visually rich applications, Gosling said Java is entering into the realm of Rich Internet Application (RIA) space with Java FX.As providers of the tool work on advanced technologies and developers closely follow them to create complex applications, the task of making simple applications with a set of tools has been left to the users themselves.

“People with a little aesthetic sense can make those dialogue boxes on mobile phones and set top boxes appear like little pictures in themselves,” Gosling said. “Java has got both the richness of Flash and Silverlight and also the depth of the computational platform – the Java Virtual Machine and its library. It’s ability to put together a lot of different technologies like animation, digital audio etc makes it a truly comprehensive technology to work on.”

-----------------------------
BY L Subramani
Source：DECCAN HERALD

Copyright 2009, The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd.