Johannesburg, 03 May 2006
The first South African leg of the annual Sun Tech Days technology conference commenced yesterday at the Sandton Convention Centre, with an opening keynote address by Java programming language creator and Sun Microsystems CTO James Gosling.
The two-day event, hosted by Sun Microsystems, is aimed at sharing ideas and technology with members of the Sun and Java application development communities around the world.
Although concentrating on developments in Java and the Sun Solaris operating system, Sun Tech Days 2006 is dominated by Java through Gosling`s presence.
New Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz in his pre-recorded address alluded to the role of Java in Sun`s mission to "create the technology to power the participation age".
In his keynote, Gosling gave an overview of Java`s impact on the computing world, development focuses and the future of Java. He concentrated on the ubiquity of the programming language he introduced to the programming world in1995 to write common applications for a variety of networked devices.
"Java is everywhere, in Web applications, healthcare and financial systems, giant telescopes, home game players and even SIM cards for mobile phones," he pointed out. Once learned, he said, Java enabled software developers to work just about anywhere.
Unique strengths
Detailing what he considered the unique strengths of Java, particularly its ability to meet the increasing demands for security, rapid application development and real-time information systems, Gosling cautioned against developer complacency.
"Although processing power may continue to increase according to Moore`s Law, clock rates are beginning to flatten out and developers will no longer be able to rely on increased processing capacity to solve application performance problems," he said.
Instead, Gosling said developers would have to resort to more effective algorithms, clean coding, multi-threading and parallelism to ensure application efficiency.
Gosling concluded his presentation by emphasising the importance of the developer community to Java`s continued evolution. He said there was no way of telling what would come next, but urged the SA developer community to become involved in the process.
Gosling is also to give the keynote address at NetBeans and Solaris Day, scheduled to follow the Sun Tech Days event at the same venue tomorrow.
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