Rickerism

Bloomberg reported today that “The Java development kit is available today under an open-source license that lets developers modify and distribute the software” (see Sun Makes Java Free, Expands Technology for Mobile-Phone Makers). Wall Street seems to have scooped the Valley, because I see no similar headline from the tech magazines.

Alex Blewitt was just complaining on Thursday in the EclipseZone newsletter about how Sun is reluctant to release a Java virtual machine (JVM) without the plethora of Java class libraries. Software companies have been investigating the deployment of languages such as Ruby and Scala on the JVM. Sun has released already JSR 223, scripting for the Java platform.

I ask myself, is today’s announcement the watershed event to unleash these virtual machine forces? Has Sun opened a gate to far more than they have anticipated?

Virtual machine architecture is a dramatic change in the way software is built, especially embedded software. For the past three years, I have become all too much acquainted with the pain and suffering of C language embedded development. After spending 10 years in the Java world, I wonder how the embedded developers get anything accomplished at all. It’s like watching cavemen bang rocks together. One must remember that Java was initially intended for devices. OSGi, the underlying architecture of Eclipse, was also intended for devices.

Does the announcement today from Sun mean we can now use as much or as little of the JVM as we want? If so, industry is now free to create embedded VMs that run scripting languages. That would mean the embedded world could leap ahead in simplicity. The cost of embedded development would plummet because the skills and knowledge necessary would be far less demanding.