JavaOne 4.2: Mr. Joy's wired on the future

June 16, 1999
JavaOne 4.2: Mr. Joy's wired on the future

by Kieron Murphy

San Francisco -- Move over, Mr. Jetson, you're history. Sun Microsystems' chief scientist today outlined his view of a world of tomorrow in which intelligent devices will become lean, mean, and pervasive -- with Java and Jini technology leading the way.

Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, told a massive audience at day two of the fourth JavaOne conference here that in looking to the future, he found himself reflecting on the past, especially as today's monolithic systems began to experience the failures that arise from complexity. He alluded to his days as a systems administrator at the Univ. of California at Berkeley in the early Eighties. "I began to get quite uncomfortable when I was working on stuff with about a million lines of code and realized that it wouldn't scale. It wasn't going to scale to more lines; it wasn't going to scale to more people. And that's when I started looking for a language like Java."

The person who has been charged for the past ten years specifically with charting the course of the future of technology for his company, laid out four key roads for computing to follow: Objects everywhere; spontaneous networks; systems on a chip; and immersive media.

"The first of these is made possible with Java ... the second is realized with Jini," Joy noted.

He added that economies of scale and efficiency will be maximized by using single-chip systems in very inexpensive devices. Joy said these will still be robust enough to provide immersive multimedia experiences.

"My vision of Java is that you can write programs that don't depend on where they run -- to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. So that programmers can write components and put them in libraries, and they can be used by others on machines that we haven't even imagined yet."

Like many others, Joy foresees a looming post-PC era, or "age of BIOS development," in which computing becomes dominated by the volume deployment of items such as handhelds, screenphones, set-tops, and a host of compact, smart appliances -- all running apps written in highly scaleable languages and connected together in communities that know how to interact with one another. He pointed to a day when a meeting could take place in which the mobile phones brought into the room would "understand" what behavior to observe from programmed devices in the room that supply the "context" of the meeting's rules -- sort of a common-sense for hardware.

Joy said this machine intelligence would be provided by "ubiquitous networks" using technologies such as Jini for persistent distributed computing via agents. And with improvements in processing power still following the track of Moore's Law into the future, which he believes has a long way to go before it is exhausted, the foundation will be laid for an era of terabyte computing (or an improvement in power of 1,000 times), coupled with other looming breakthroughs such as numerical programming. This new age of efficiency is something he sees as ushering in a world saturated with immersive media.

"A technology that is a thousand times faster is indistinguishable from magic to anyone who hasn't seen its effects," said Joy.

The Sun leader noted that the future for developers paving the road ahead would not be an easy one. But he noted, "When things are hard, they're worth doing."

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