IBM Corp spent most of yesterday reviewing its entire Java strategy and momentum at a meeting in New York before the Java floodgates open at the Java internet business expo today. Though it doesn’t own Java, IBM wants the industry to perceive Big Blue as having the leading Java product story. Developers and customers were wheeled out to reveal the depth of their collective support, while IBM had all of its product teams there to demonstrate how each is pushing down hard on the Java pedal. IBM says its research shows that more than 90% of corporations have at least three different server platforms and offered third party analysis to demonstrate how important cross-platform Java will be to them. Forrester estimates that 75% of companies are using Java on the server and that 100% will be within two years. Gartner believes server-side Java will be more important than client side Java within 13 months. IBM says ISVs will have created 1,500 applications using its Java-based San Francisco application development frameworks by 2001 and that Java will be used to develop 70% of enterprise business logic by 2002. IDC estimates Java offers a 30% saving on coding costs and a 40% saving on maintenance. IBM Java luminary Ian Brackenbury says that in 1999 IBM’s Java technology development will focus on increasing the number of Java development tools it offers, developing more back-end connections and increasing the level of Corba and Microsoft Corp integration. Corba, he observes has appalling APIs for programmers but is a great way of connecting distributed components, which is why IBM is pushing its Enterprise Java Beans components model. IBM is betting the future of enterprise application programming rests with EJB and is adamant that its usefulness must be not compromised by kludging integration with other models and services including the Corba components development model. Brackenbury observes a spec for supporting Corba components in EJB hasn’t even been agreed yet, so when it will actually be implemented is anyone’s guess. In addition to using the Corba IIOP for infrastructure services, Brackenbury also expects to leverage Corba for its Microsoft interoperability. That won’t be the only way for IBM to achieve interoperability with COM/DCOM but Brackenbury says the company hasn’t yet decided what else it will use. What it can say is that it expects users and ISVs to write applications using IBM tools that also enable them to pull in third party services. IBM says it will look at Sun’s Jini distributed Java technology but has made no commitment to it at this point.
