Computerworld - James Gosling, the father of Java, is now the chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s developer products group. In the aftermath of the company's big JavaOne event this week, he weighed in on the company's difficulties in the commercial tools space in an interview with Computerworld.
Sun puts on this annual JavaOne showcase, yet few developers use Sun's tools. How do you feel about that? I think up until recently our tools haven't been as interesting as they should have been. With NetBeans 3.6, we finally have a release that has very crisp performance and a really good feature set. Until that came out, we haven't been able to push it as much as we would like. NetBeans has been out as an open-source project for, like, four years, but it wasn't until a year and a half ago that it really got energy put behind it. We've been getting really good numbers of downloads of NetBeans. And Creator is really the first product that we've launched that has broad market appeal, because it is targeted at the Visual Basic developer -- the sort of person who doesn't want to spend all of his time thinking about the guts of writing code. They need to be able to build these things very rapidly.
So do you think Creator and NetBeans 3.6 will start to change the situation? Yeah. And the 4.0 release of NetBeans is very close to being ready. And it's lovely.
What's so great in the new version of NetBeans? We've put a lot of effort into cleaning up the user experience, making the user experience less geeky, making the workflow a lot smoother. We've had huge, huge pushes on performance to make it very sprightly. The NetBeans team tended to be very focused on academic purity. Getting them to be a little more blue collar was a challenge. But they've really gotten the religion. And now they've put a lot of effort into polishing the details.
What's in store for the future of Java Studio Creator? You can drag and drop components and build these apps beautifully, and subsequent versions of Creator are going to broaden that scope. The next version of Creator, for instance, isn't going to be limited to generating HTML as the output but [will] be able to build rich clients. We'd been hoping to be able to put down all that this year, but it wasn't quite ready.
When will it be ready? Hard to tell. Certainly next year is kind of
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