'J2EE is to Java what SQL was to databases.' That's a direct quote from one of my conversations with software vendors during JavaOne. And I tend to agree with the statement. I spent most of the show talking with people regarding their products, their visions and their strategies. It was clear to me that J2EE is a standard with enough meat behind it to generate adoption by many companies as the clear design for their products.

Java Developer's Journal announced its first annual Readers' Choice Awards program three years ago as a patented and copyrighted innovation. JDJ's Readers' Choice Awards program became the first true, openly monitored media awards program of its kind. As happens with every innovation, since then we've seen a number of other media organizations and magazines imitate this program.

Yes, I was in San Francisco last month - but unlike the other 25,000 pilgrims, I wasn't fortunate enough to pay full homage to the Mecca of Java: JavaOne 2000. Instead, I was trapped in somewhat less than invigorating business meetings. I was also in a hurry to get back to Dallas to my wife and my brand new (two-week old) baby boy. However, I did manage to sneak out for a few hours on two separate days to the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco to sip from the Java technology cup.…

I spent a couple of weeks in Florida recently - ignoring the Internet and hoping the market dip would go away. It felt good not to pull e-mail (all right, I did, but not every day) and it gave me some time to think about the whirlwind pace that's been the routine of the past year.

Third time's the charm this time. After two aborted attempts to write this column, I finally was able to put pen to paper (all right, fingers to keyboard). I've been really busy patenting the two through 10 click methods of buying on the Internet. I'll shortly be asking for a royalty for every time someone clicks twice, etc.

Some trends you just don't see coming, like the return of bell-bottom pants. They are mysterious and leave you wondering what people can possibly be thinking about. Other trends are much more comprehensible and when they start to manifest themselves, you tend to wonder why on earth you hadn't seen them coming in the first place.…

One of the frustrations of editing a monthly magazine, as opposed to a daily newspaper, is that I seldom get to scoop the rest of the press. With our lead times, breaking news is more or less old by the time you hear it from me. So by now you've heard that Corel has merged with Inprise, maker of my favorite IDE, JBuilder.

I may be somewhat unusual, but I've never bought anything at an online auction. I've seen eBay, and one of my friends sold some of his collection of valuable magazines (okay, comic books) on eBay, but I've never gone the whole route and come home with the goods. I've thought about it a couple of times. I recently built a computer from parts, and one of the places I looked for motherboards had an auction, but they didn't have the board I wanted and there was no way to post my own offer to buy.

Yech. I hate that title as much as you do, but it stuck in my brain and I can't get it out. Things are going on in the industry, and I think this is an appropriate time to cover them. We were at the Java Business Conference in December, covering what appeared to be more of a nonevent than a true exposition. Probably the biggest disappointment was Sun's backing out of the standards process for Java.

Are you nimble enough? That seems to be the new buzzword in the Internet world. Nimble. Nimbleness. Nimbler. My development team is nimbler than yours. Being nimble is the name of the game today. It's not enough to be good developers, we've got to be quick developers.

We have exciting news for you. The qualified circulation of Java Developer's Journal print edition reached a record high of 70,017 for the June issue, according to BPA International's June 1999 initial audit report. For the June issue JDJ printed and distributed over 104,000 copies, including 13,000 bonus copies distributed at JavaOne in San Francisco. Show copies were not included in JDJ's qualified circulation figures. Based on the most current data available through BPA International (June statements), JDJ's qualfied circulation now is higher than Java Report and Java Pro combined.

It's not often you get to write an end-of-the-millennium column (once every thousand years, last time I checked). I thought that a little reminiscing about the past few years might be in order, followed by a brief look in the crystal ball to see what we have in store for you in the next century.

Here's an old joke. A guy in a strange town needs to get a haircut. There're only two barbers in the town, but the guy doesn't know either of them. Which one does he pick? The answer is the guy with the worst haircut. Why? Because neither barber can cut his own hair, so the guy with the worst haircut is the better barber.

Earlier this year I wrote an article describing how Enterprise JavaBeans had impacted the application server market, causing a convergence between Web application servers and distributed object and transaction servers. With the advent of the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) standard, we're about to witness another seismic shift in this market.

When I was a teenager, my parents taught me never to argue about sex, politics and religion. Later on I also learned that it's never a good idea to argue with drunks. Now I find myself in the unenviable position of having to step into the middle of a "religious" debate.

Sometimes I think no one reads the editorial. Normally I receive maybe no more than fifty comments concerning any editorial. I kid myself that I do a good enough job lining up the content for the magazine that no one has any complaints, and that they post each month's editorial on a wall for all to see. In reality, I hope it doesn't show up on that many dart boards ­ I know programmers.

All right, I'm ready to admit that I made a slight miscalculation. Not an error, necessarily...just a slight misjudgment when it came to the timing of something. Back in January I made a set of predictions concerning the industry, as I'm wont to do at the beginning of a new year. In those predictions I stated that I didn't think we'd see any Enterprise JavaBean products until the end of this year.

I recently attended a technical conference and sat in on an interesting discussion concerning moving from traditional testing to testing of object-oriented systems. As many of you know, testing and quality assurance is one of my pet peeves. All too often, groups of otherwise intelligent, experienced software developers become spineless jellyfish when it comes to putting together and sticking with a realistic estimate for the amount of testing needed to ensure that the system under development is completed and debugged. We've all paid the price for this neglect. How many service packs, patches and point updates have you had to install for your commercial software? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The press rarely gets a glimpse inside the halls of industry to report on the situation within internal development groups. Gross underestimation of the testing effort involved in software development is a significant contributor to our software problems.

Based on published research by industry analysts, over 400 million special-purpose electronic, non-PC embedded devices will be sold this year ­ and over 1.2 billion units by the year 2001. By 2002, analysts predict shipments of smart handheld devices such as PDAs, Palm Pilots and smart phones will reach 25 million units. By year 2003, analysts project that smart cards equipped with miniature databases could make their way into virtually every purse and wallet in America. More than a billion chip cards were shipped worldwide in 1998 alone.

Every so often I read something that makes me scratch my head and wonder. Most recently this phenomenon occurred when I read an editorial concerning Java and XML in a Web development magazine. The author wrote that he thought the concept of XML was easy to understand in terms of its usefulness, while he was puzzled over the reason for Enterprise JavaBeans. I sat back and said to myself, Is it me, or do people who get into programming by designing Web sites always get it backwards? Not to malign the author, who did a good job of explaining both technologies, but I've been working with EJB for a year, and it seems like a pretty clear concept to me. What I can't seem to get is the importance of XML.

Web-development of every kind is one focus of Sybase PowerJ 3.0 (see Figure 1). In addition to a complete Java development environment, PowerJ comes with a set of tools that differentiates it from other Java IDEs on the market. These tools are PowerDynamo, a Web site hosting tool that allows you to drive a Web site from a database; PowerSite, a Web site management tool; Adaptive Server Anywhere, a small-footprint relational database; ObjectCycle, a source code control package; and Enterprise Application Server. Sybase is also lowering the price of PowerJ, placing it in the $600­$800 range. Given the tools that come in the package, that's not an unreasonable price.

The saying goes, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." The world rewards innovation and improvement. It likes new things. This month's focus is on new Java technology. Given the rapid pace of development in our area, that's not quite the oxymoron that it appears. New specifications, new releases, new products come out almost daily. Last year SUN released the 1.0 specification for Enterprise JavaBeans. I can name a dozen products that implement the 1.0 specification at this point, and that number is likely to grow before it shrinks. More recently, the Java 2.0 release became available to the general public. Depending on your viewpoint, this is either old news to you, or too bleeding edge to consider yet.

Last month I came to you as a developer as opposed to a CEO. Well, this time I'm moving up the social ladder and I'm writing in the capacity of a user. I'd like to tell you a little story that scared the living daylights out of me. Continuing on the "Ally McBeal" theme from last time, I have seen a glimpse of the future, and all I can say is, "I am troubled."

I remember the first time I saw Jurassic Park and watched as the little girl proceeded to hack into a UNIX system, quickly taking control of the entire park. I couldn't help but laugh at how unlikely that whole scenario was, but it does serve to illustrate the way many people think of programming. With this month's focus on code and things related, I thought it would be apropos to discuss what we do for a living.

I'm going to write this editorial as a developer, not as a CEO. Not specifically a Java developer, but a generic, abstract developer - someone that is involved with shaping tomorrow's software. I'm a very worried man. If I were to be a TV character, I would be "the Biscuit" from Ally McBeal, deep in thought, with a concerned look on my face. Let me explain.

About a year ago, in a magazine not too far away, I wrote an article called "Middle-Tier Madness." A year and several languages later, we're back at the middle-tier stage again. Distributed computing is one of my main areas of interest, so my concern with the middle tier shouldn't surprise anyone.

Java Developer's Journal was among the many exhibitors at the Java Business Expo at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. I was only able to make it for one day, but I managed to pack a great deal of interviewing, observation and conversation into that day, in addition to presenting our Editor's Choice Awards. (See JDJ Vol. 4, Issue 1.)

Welcome to 1999. This is typically the time I make predictions about the coming year. Next year I'll get this issue out and have a good laugh at all the things I missed - and the few I actually get right. I'd be remiss in my editorial duty if I didn't make some predictions.

Every now and then I like to step back from the trenches and try to think like a CIO. I was a CIO at one time, so I can actually do such a thing. And lately, when I think my CIO thoughts, I've been thinking about the impact that Java has made on the Enterprise.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will build a better mouse. In the beginning we had a two-tiered architecture (I count mainframes as prehistory), and we could figure out how to do things with it. Unfortunately, one of the things we figured out was that we needed more than two tiers. Up came the concept of an application server and a Web server to accompany our ubiquitous database server.

Delivering on the Promise of Java

Nov. 1, 1998 12:00 AM  Reads: 8,200

Toward the end of the last Batman movie, when Robin is giving Batman a hard time, George Clooney gets fed up and says, "This is why Superman works alone." While I'm often tempted to think along the same lines, the reality of our business is that we work in teams. This leads to the topic of this month's diatribe: team development.

About two years ago a colleague of mine named Joe leaned over my cubicle wall and said, "Hey, I just downloaded this new language called Java. It's pretty cool!" At the time I can't remember being very excited about another programming language. I was a PowerBuilder maven and Joe was up to his eyeballs in C++. That probably accounts for some of my disinterest and Joe's initial drooling (sorry, Joe, but you did). Two years and one large-scale Java project later, I'm as much a convert as Joe.

Picture this. You sit down in your recliner, tell it to go to the "TV watching position," then address your desire to your new 81-inch TV - "Find me a rerun of I Dream of Jeanie" -and sit back to watch Barabara Eden confound Larry Hagman yet again. Sounds far-fetched, but Sun is on the case trying to make it a reality.

In recent issues of Java Developer's Journal you may have noticed a new "feel" to the magazine. The editorial team at JDJ is dedicated to continually improving its content and providing its readers with cutting-edge, informative material. I have come aboard JDJ as managing editor with a growing enthusiasm for Java's future and its possibilities, and hope to imbue you, our readers, with more Java fervor.

In this month's cover story we focus on how to earn big money with Java on three levels. JDJ's feature brings you practical tips for the Java programmer by both Ed Zebrowski, JDJ's product review editor, and Sean Rhody. We also have a somewhat technical discussion by Juergen Brendel covering the software engineering issues in startup companies. We conclude the cover story with a feature on the "Java Electronic Commerce Framework," which concerns Sun's JECF architecture for established businesses.

Almost invariably, when I write an article I know pretty much what I want to say, and the part I have the most difficulty with is the introduction. This is my first column as editor-in-chief of Java Developer's Journal, so while most of you are familiar with our magazine, many of you may be less familiar with me. I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself, and also describe where I think we'll be taking JDJover the next few months.

There's one form of power that is almost universally recognized in our society, the power of consumer spending. This is at the heart of all commerce, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise must have something to sell you. I read today that more than 45 million American homes now have computers, and I'm sure that the number of computers used in businesses far exceeds that. I doubt that anyone will argue the fact that a lot of technology-driven consumer spending power is at work in our economy.

Visual Basic is arguably the most successful programming language in the history of programming languages. The number of VB components and applications out there is staggering, and the number of VB programmers is even more so. However, there is a not so silent contender for the World's Most Popular Language. It's OO, multithreaded and Internet-ready. It's an expressive and flexible language capable of industrial-strength server-side computing and, for the C++ crowd, here's the real rub: it's idiot-proof. It's Java. Java not only promises enterprise solution-capable software, it promises to do so with VB-style ease of use and with an unrivaled adoption rate. Therein lies the central issue: The combination of ease of use, power and popularity makes Java an important language for the software engineering community.

Have you heard the words 'build virtual teams, extend the corporation, manage the supply chain'? Are you convinced that e-business, enterprise applications deployed over the Web, Internet plus intranet plus extranet are the way to go? Chances are you've thought about this and your answer is yes. But what does that mean to you, right now, as we're one Web year into 1998?