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Aug. 6, 1997

Microsoft declares war on Java portability

The story

From ComputerWorld, 28 July 1997, lead story (excerpted), Microsoft declares war:

Microsoft Corp. last week formally declared war on Sun and its Java Foundation Class Libraries, making clear its intention to block efforts to make Java an industrywide, cross-platform development language.
"[Sun] is trying to turn the JFCs into the Sun operating system". said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's executive VP of sales and support. It's sort of the next chance for Sun to be a desktop operating system player. The first one was Unix [...] Now, they are trying again with JFC, and we hope they don't win." [...] They are trying to get this to be a runtime layer to which application vendors write their applications. Those are the APIs they want people to write to." [...]
Also describing the Java Foundation Classes as "a competing operating system" to Windows was Microsoft Group VP Paul Maritz: [...] We have no intention of shipping another bloated operating system and forcing that down the throats of our Windows Customers". [...]
It's clear that Microsoft wants to stop Java", said an information development technology executivea at a Fortune 200 company that asked not to be identified. [...]
Other users said they had always been skeptical of Java's ability to deliver on its cross-platform promises. "Java is not purely cross-platform, and it never will be", said Dave Schrier, director of product development at Black Diamond Consulting in Porstmouth, N.H.

A related story

Last week's story (from IEEE Computer), described the attempt by Sun Microsystems to standardize Java while in effect keeping it proprietary, and the complaints this has triggered from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Lucent, Microsoft and Intel, resulting in a rejection of Sun's plan by the Technical Advisory Group of the standardization organizations. See Plan for Java Standards Draws Fire (last week's story) for more details.

Our comment

Last week's story showed the limits of Java's promise of openness. With the rift between Microsoft and Sun, the promise of portability also evaporates.

Eiffel, and in particular ISE Eiffel, provides one of the very few truly portable development environment available in the software industry. The same set of tools and libraries runs across Windows NT, Windows 95, Unix (a dozen different platforms), Linux and VMS with no need for source code change. In particular: EiffelVision is a fully portable graphical library; and the EiffelNet library supports multi-platform client-server development, with fully transparent object exchange. The recently released EiffelCORBA implementation supports interoperability with other platforms and languages. ISE's C and C++ interface is one more tool supporting openness and portability.

For corporate customers who are looking for an open and portable solution available today, rather than promises subject to the conflicting requirements of companies that fiercely compete with each other, the choice is clear.

Reference

ComputerWorld, issue of July 28, 1997. The magazine's Web page is at http://www.computerworld.com.

To other "news stories of the week".