Open Possibilities

An Interview with JCP Chair Onno Kluyt from JavaOne 2007

by Frank Sommers and Bill Venners
May 31, 2007

Summary
This year's JavaOne slogan was "Open Possibilities." Artima asked Sun's JCP Chair Onno Kluyt to tell us about new possibilities that some Java developers may find surprising. In this interview, Kluyt describes three Java technologies that allow developers to build new kinds of applications.

As Chair of the JCP, Onno Kluyt gets to have an early look at most new Java technologies, certainly those that wind their way through the Java standardization process. We thought that Kluyt might be a good person to ask to help make this year's JavaOne slogan, Open Possibilities, a bit more concrete.

In this brief interview, Kluyt shares three technologies that he thought could hold new promises to Java developers. While each technology has been around for many years, only in the past year did each mature to the point where each is of interest to almost any Java developer:

If you had a real-time JRE, what would you do with it? A mainstream, runtime environment with real-time capabilities?... What if you had that available in a Java EE application server, or in your runtime environment on the desktop? What kinds of things would you go and build for that?

What if you had the same very rich API, things like Swing and Java 2D, not just on the desktop, but also on the TV set-top box, or on your ... mobile phone? What kind of applications would you build [to take advantage of that]?

We showed during one of the keynotes ... Project Iris. It [lets you] drag and drop pictures into your Web page... And you can edit those pictures, because now you have an applet there, integrated into your browser, and you get full access to Java 2D, and other graphical APIs. Because manipulation [of the images] does not involve round-trips to the server, you can provide a much faster and richer environment...

Click to download audio Onno Kluyt, Chair of the Java Community Process (JCP), talks about new possibilities available to Java developers. (6 minutes 15 seconds)

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About the authors

Frank Sommers is Editor-in-Chief of Artima Developer. He also serves as chief editor of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing's newsletter, and is an elected member of the Jini Community's Technical Advisory Committee. Prior to joining Artima, Frank wrote the Jiniology and Web services columns for JavaWorld.

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc. He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Bill has been active in the Jini Community since its inception. He led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services. Bill also serves as an elected member of the Jini Community's initial Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), and in this role helped to define the governance process for the community.