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Sun's Gage Hypes the Distributed World

NEW YORK -- The future, says Sun Microsystems Inc.'s science director John Gage, is embedded devices and distributed computing. That was the main focus of his keynote address at Internet World '98 today.

After failing to display the live view from his video camera to his PC and blaming the problem on Micrsoft's Windows OS, Gage went on to explain that the focus for developers should be directed towards the language, not the OS. That way devices aren't hindered by operating-system conflicts.

The reason, he says, is that, "The software world is a mess." Quoting from a recent report to the U.S. government, Gage says, "The demand for software far exceeds the nation's supply.".

Sun's vice president of research Bill Joy joined the presentation and spoke about the severe differences between what developers do now, and what they'll need to do in the coming years. "The problem is we've centralized everything like some Soviet regime. The future is distributed," says Joy.

Joy's community of the future is objects and agents. He says future developers will be using Java to develop object-oriented components and distributing them with Jini, Sun's new technology that allows developers to move objects around and keep the code and data in place.

"HTML allows computers to talk to people. Chat helps people talk to people. Jini is the first language to allow computers to talk to computers," says Joy, who is best-known for developing the first implementations of TCP/IP. -- Brian Ploskina, Assistant Editor

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.