Newsmaker: Gosling looks down Sun's open road

(continued from previous page)

It's amazing how many people will do something like that because it makes their life easier. The world is filled with IT operations where the staff has gotten annoyed with all the security so they just turn it off.

Or they'll do really dumb things like put a copy of their entire customer database on their laptop hard drive and then go on vacation and lose the laptop.

Do you think the onus is just on the IT department to have stricter policies or do you think there's anything that can be done to make it easier for them?
Gosling: We put in an immense amount of effort into trying to make it such that the security policies are as easy to administer as possible. We want to make sure that things are not onerous, that things are not pushing IT departments to be lazy. There's a lot of stuff in Java and a lot of stuff in Solaris (Sun's Unix operating system) that are about trying to make bulletproof systems easy to live with. But in some places there's no limit to human laziness.

The first examples of Java technology were developed for consumer electronics. Are you surprised at how it's taken hold in the enterprise?
Gosling: The fact it could be used in an enterprise was not a surprise because it was very much designed to handle large-scale server operations. The bit that surprised me was the scale of enterprise adoption.

Can you give an example of something that surprised you?
Gosling: The big racks in the travel industry at places like Sabre and Orbitz. When you look at a company like FedEx which uses Java heavily--you can't send a parcel through FedEx without a bunch of Java code being involved. It's almost impossible to execute a financial transaction without a piece of Java code being involved.

"You can't send a parcel through FedEx without a bunch of Java code being involved."

What's the most interesting use of Java you've seen?
Gosling: I'm more interested in the science side of things. The current Mars rovers that are wandering around on Mars, the ground control system has a lot of Java code in it. Or the Keck telescopes, the world's largest telescopes. Their control system has big bags of Java code in it. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

Software development costs continue to be a large portion of IT budgets. Is there any hope for reducing these costs?
Gosling: No. And my answer "no" is probably a little bit twisted. I've spent most of my professional career building tools for developers to help reduce costs, to make it so developers can be more effective, more productive and in general stuff like that has been really effective. But then there's this sort of depressing observation that if you look at what IT departments are spending, it doesn't really go down.

What I've observed is this funny phenomenon. If you come up with a good software development tool, that makes life easier for the developers and they can get their job done quicker. Then the first thing the manager says is "Oh, you've got free time on your hands. Do this extra thing."

So IT departments are spending the same amount but doing more?
Gosling: If you look at what IT departments are doing today, some huge fraction of (this) they weren't doing five and 10 years ago. There was no online banking. There were no online stock transactions. There was no online travel. It was all quite different. The set of things people want to do with IT is expanding at the speed that the IT departments can cope with.

So pretty much every IT department will always be running right on the edge of collapse because if you ever get beyond the edge of collapse, you collapse, things fail, things fall apart. If you ever get on the other side, things get a little bit easy and people say "We can do more."

In some sense I've resigned myself. In the land of tool builders like me, it's not about cutting IT costs as much as it is inevitably about enabling IT departments to do more.

Looking at the development tools used today, what do you think is missing? What is needed?
Gosling: The focus has shifted from the language to the development environment and the programming interfaces. A language works pretty well as a hub around which everything revolves. Mostly the really interesting advances in enterprise software development over the last few years have been in the tools, in the IDEs (integrated development environments).

More Newsmakers

[Shef Seattle]

Tired of Java updates

The laptop I bought has somehow JRE pre-installed. I was tired of contact Java updates and so I just uninstalled it. It is no different than Windows; it constantly needs updating. Just another headache.

[Shef Seattle]

Spelling Correction

The laptop I bought had somehow JRE pre-installed. I was tired of constant Java updates and so I just uninstalled it. It is no different than Windows; it constantly needs updating. Just another headache.

[Shef Seattle]

Spelling Correction

The laptop I bought had somehow JRE pre-installed. I was tired of constant Java updates and so I just uninstalled it. It is no different than Windows; it constantly needs updating. Just another headache.

[Dalkorian]

stagnation

There's a word for something that never improves - stagnation.

You missed the real point entirely. The point isn't wether
something needs an update, the point is does the update
improve anything. With your idiotic Winblows OS, the updates
normally just break things that used to work *WITHOUT*
increasing security whatsoever.

*THAT* is a headache!

[stephenwalli]

Living on the "edge of collapse" is GOOD!

The sort of enablement he describes on the second page is a good thing. All our advances in languages and tools are about developing more (better) software by writing less code. From higher level (compiled) languages, to modules, libraries, objects (and distributed objects), scripting languages, web services, visualization, configuration management, and automated build and delivery, it's all about enablement. Every time we double the speed or transistor density of a chip, or the bandwidth on the Net, we come up with new and interesting applications to devour it. So too with human capacity.

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/03/it_departments_.html

[Blito]

Liberalese

Well theres definite la divide in Mac and Linux users.
MS gets the job done of running software but in a conservative sense it's quite boring to some. I like that boring steel structure that you know will run what you want it to run. I don't haev to use anti virus with MS and certainly not Vista.