Publication Date: July 15, 1996

Java Wins Praise, But It's Still So New

By Ken Shulman

It has been hailed as the great equalizer for the World Wide Web, as an instrument that will have as profound an effect on the way we use the Internet as Windows had on the way we use our PCs. Considerable praise for a programming language that is scarcely one year old. Yet Java has sent hordes of programmers scrambling to master its syntax and has caused IT professionals and MIS consultants to reach deep into their bags of tricks to find practical applications for this concept: a cross-platform programming language that allows true interactivity on the Web.

"I think Java is a little bit ahead of its time," says Steve Mann, of Computer Associates of Islandia, N.Y. "We all know what the issues are: Robust transactions on the Web. Functionality that requires high bandwidth. Right now, people are just beginning to use tools like Java to accomplish their aims, and to be able to conduct true electronic commerce on the Internet."

Java may well be a solution in search of a problem. But there are scores of programmers and managers who already have used it to their advantage. "Too many companies conduct one-way communications over the Web between client and server," says Donna Rubin, director of corporate marketing development at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where Java was invented. "The messages go back to the HTTP server. This is very inefficient, and a tremendous waste of bandwidth. Just try to imagine 5,000 people, all entering data onto the same field on their screens. With Java, the interface and even the Web browser can come from the server. We can conduct a three-tiered exchange, between the client, the business logic, and the database he is consulting."

Alluring Features

Both Java acolytes and skeptics agree on its major virtues. The language is object-oriented and has facilitated the exchange of applications over the Web. Java's platform independence, allowing programs written in that language to run on virtually any sort of system, is perhaps its most attractive feature to businesses. "Imagine a company with several thousand computers, all of them operating on different platforms," says Paul Tyma, author of The Java Primer Plus (Waite Group Press) and president of Preemptive Solutions in Syracuse, N.Y. "They can all run the same program. It's hard to convince a Macintosh user to give up his machine, just as it's hard to ask a PC user to abandon his. With Java, you don't have to do this."

As an application that seems tailor made for the Web, Java may be the instrument that will transform the often inscrutable Internet into a more orderly, interactive and homogenous network. "It provides a very rich player capability," says Alan Holzman, strategic technology manager of the Internet and Communications Group at Intel Corp. "It provides interactivity over the Internet. It allows you to run an application within your Web browser. You get involved and interact with what you are seeing on your screen. This is the difference. This is where you'll really start to see the Internet take off."

Java does have many of the characteristics that one would expect of a Web leveler. It is object-oriented, permitting users to pick and choose among elements in existing programs instead of downloading an entire application. Banks and retail chains, for example, can use Java to customize the same application, picking and choosing among applets to build software best suited to their business and communications needs. With Java, internal corporate networks, or intranets, can be designed to funnel specific information to specific work stations, streamlining communications by customizing user interface according to the person's place on the corporate food chain.

An Inclusive Tool

Universal in scope, Java is also populist. One needs neither expensive hardware nor state-of-the-art software to deploy it on the Internet. Machines with 28.8 baud modems are fast enough to interact with Java. "If your machine can run Netscape, it can run Java," says Rubin. "And the applets are usually quite small. Java isn't intended to exclude people from working on the Web. It's intended to pull everything together, and in a much more harmonious way."

For the computer language illiterate, Java is not an easy code to master. Yet Tyma, who works as a Java trainer, reports that programmers with experience in C or C++ almost always leave his three-day training sessions able to work in the new language.

Java's early successes, and its enormous potential, have inspired dozens of similar products soon to be released onto the market, including Computer Associates' JADE and Microsoft's ActiveX. Yet for the moment many consultants are advising caution over Java.

"For on-line animation, Java has already been quite useful," says Greg Bean, president of Cybergroup of Baltimore, Md. "But I wouldn't deploy it just yet on mission-critical transaction systems. The product isn't mature enough. The tools aren't mature enough. And no one has more than a few months experience with it. This doesn't matter a whole lot when we're putting up some animation. But when we're trying to build a central business system, it matters a lot."

Ken Shulman writes from Cambridge, Mass.

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