Java may perk up home networks

By Richard Morochove

First published November 12, 1998

If you've ever wrestled with connecting a new VCR to your home entertainment system, you know it's not always easy to plug the cables into the right sockets. All you need is a bit of Java to make the job easier, according to James Gosling.

Let's make it clear we're talking about the Java programming language and platform and not the beverage. You see Gosling is the Canadian who is the lead engineer and key architect behind Java. He's vice president of Java Software, a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems Inc. and a Sun Fellow.

Looking like an avuncular math professor, Gosling explains his concerns with the increasing complexity of today's consumer electronics appliances.

"You look at the back of anybody's stereo system today and there's just a huge forest of wires," says Gosling. "The number of people who can actually go out, successfully buy a DVD player and then connect it in, is really small."

There's a growing amount of built-in intelligence in new models of consumer electronics devices ranging from telephones to VCRs and microwave ovens. Yet there's no DVD button on the typical remote control. So how do you get all these devices to work together?

Gosling believes the answer lies in Jini, the networking system that's based on Java. The objective: buy something, plug it in and it works.

Once you connect a device to your home network, it announces itself to the other network devices and does the right thing. For example, you plug in a VCR and it finds your television on your network. Hook up a printer and it tells your computer it's available. Then the devices interact in a smart way.

"Your telephone rings, you pick up the phone and your VCR knows to pause," says Gosling.

Today, Java is associated with interesting applets on the Internet, ranging from interactive games to financial calculators. Yet when Gosling began work on the programming project in late 1990, it had a different focus.

A small group at Sun Microsystems were intrigued by developments in consumer electronics and wondered how you might network devices together.

"I'm a big believer in learning by doing. You can't believe that you actually understand something until you've been through the real nitty-gritty details and really sweated a lot of it out," says Gosling. "So we decided to build a prototype as a learning exercise."

The result was a handheld remote control that many people thought was a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). In addition to infrared communications it also came with a 900 MHz. spread spectrum radio for longer range networking. When two handhelds came within range, they recognized each other and initiated communications.

"You could phone up someone and hand them your VCR over the network," says Gosling.

His group first tried to do this using the C programming language.

"It kept breaking down," says Gosling. "A lot of the stuff around networking wasn't working very well."

There were also many different chips that ran consumer electronics devices, so they needed a new programming language that could span different CPU (central processing unit) architectures.

"I've got a long history of building various little languages. I'm probably more leery than most about building yet another language," says Gosling. "But since I was the guy who had done this a dozen times before, I was stuck with it."

Sun used Java as a in-house general programming language for five years, yet its public debut came as a Internet programming language.

"We wanted to have an elevator pitch, a demo that you could show to someone in 10 or 15 seconds. We decided to showcase that in an Internet form. We built this web browser, HotJava, that had applets in it," says Gosling.

Instead of seeing a static picture of a molecule on a Web page, you could reach out, grab the molecule and spin it around, viewing it from different angles using a molecule viewer program written in Java.

Today there are thousands of Java applets available on the Internet and many more are developed by large corporations for in-house use. Yet not everyone loves it. Microsoft has been accused of trying to sabotage Java.

Gosling says, "Microsoft has this basic strategy that they call 'embrace and extend' which some people call 'disgrace and distend.' But it's all about making it easy so that people can get onto the Microsoft platform. And then they screw around with it so that going the other direction is really hard."

According to Gosling, Java is a technology that's all about creating a level playing field, which is why Microsoft is getting so steamed up about it.

What's in Java's future?

"Java is a building material that has some really strange properties. It's like somebody inventing a new type of concrete that has different tensile strengths," says Gosling. "In some sense, where Java goes is determined by what people do with it." CW