Java & Open Source

Sun Microsystems fellow James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language, says in an interview that he expected Java to go open source, recalling that the development of the language followed a model that was very similar to open source. Gosling notes that all of the source code is published and community interaction is very collaborative, and he is confident that the new open source status of Java will permit other open source communities to bundle Sun's Java implementation. Gosling describes JavaFX as "a really strong, coordinated set of client-side technologies" that will feature JavaFX Mobile, a deployment of the cell phone stack along with the cell phone hardware. He says cell phones are evolving into desktop computers, pointing out that a pretty small number of activities--email, Web browsing, etc.--comprise the majority of desktop applications used. "Those apps all work really well on cell phones, and there have been cell phones that do this for years," Gosling says. He says Java is a platform for building rich and sophisticated Internet applications, and easing the difficulty of building such applications is what most of his efforts have been focused on. Gosling laments the low student enrollment in computer science, which he chiefly blames on both the media's exaggeration of the IT outsourcing trend and the dot-com crash, which he says simply represented the collapse of companies whose ideas were bad.