This morning Dave Winer points to the NY Times Article on how Sun is going to “Extend its Lead” by providing an alternative to .Net. This is very confusing as .Net is not a “thing” but a collection of things. A framework, a runtime (The Common Language Runtime [CLR]), and services. These services are both sub-services–XML Web Services–and application services. Exactly where is Sun “extending” its lead?
The article then jumps off into the fact that “Java” is the choice of cell phone vendors in the US and Europe. The rest of the article is about cell phone technology and has nothing to do with .Net or Sun’s alternative to it. It assumes that since cell phones are running “Java” that Sun has a big lead in web services?
Here is the problem. Like .Net, Java isn’t “a thing” either. It is a runtime (Java Runtime), a Framework (J2EE), a set of services, and a programming language (Java).
This lack of clarity from both vendors makes it very difficult to understand what is happening. I think what a cell phone vendor means when it says it support “Java” is that it has a Java Runtime in the phone so that Java applets can execute in the phone. Of course these applets would have to be phone specific. So I am not sure how much it buys the cell phone industry to have a unified voice for the java runtime. I can’t translate lots of cell phone runtimes into a web services “lead”.
Here are my points:
- .Net and Java terminology make it extremely difficult to understand what is happening in the news. Both Microsoft and Sun have done a terrible job of clarifying this terminology. This will take time to repair. The reason the terminology is such a mess is because it was largely created on the fly in reaction to each other rather than planned out in advance.
- Java already is a partial alternative to .Net. It is unclear exactly what Sun is going to do to be more competitive. Perhaps clear up its lexicon? Perhaps actually helping its partners with Java? Who knows? Plus, how does JUXTA fit in here? And what about Sun’s Open Network Environment (ONE)? How does that fit in?
- Finally, the Java Runtime on lots of cell phones does not translate into a web services lead for Sun.