The theme for this year’s JavaOne is “Java + You”. During JavaOne’s first general session, Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun Microsystems, expanded on what the theme means. Java will be pervasive, enabling useful content and service “across all screens of life”, whether it is your desktop PC, mobile phone or TV.

The session kicked off the conference like a rock concert. At the end of the two hour session, which featured several guest speakers, including Rikko Sakaguchi, senior vice president and head of Portfolio and Proposition at Sony Ericsson, and Ian Freed, vice president of Kindle, Amazon’s wireless reading device, a true rock star entered the stage. To an exalted audience, Neil Young talked about the digital archives of his career which he is making available on a web site empowered by Java.

Green started by highlighting some of the profound technological, economical and social changes that have occurred in recent years, which are changing the way that we use technology.

“Today it is hard to tease apart the professional and personal parts of your life, and the screen is less and less relevant; a screen is just viewport onto the network,” he said.

A lot of screens are placed on Java-enabled devices. According to Green, Java runs on 85 percent on the world’s mobile phones, 95 percent of the world’s personal computers and 100 percent of the world’s Blu-Ray video players (and, according to Green, Blu-Ray has already won the battle for high-definition DVD format supremacy against HD-DVD).

Sakaguchi, the second guest speaker at the session, represented the increasingly important mobile phone screen. He told the audience that Java is part of Sony Ericsson’s core strategy for two reasons. First, because more and more applications on the company’s phones are Java-based, and secondly, because the seamless user experience – “across all screens of life” as Green put it – is enabled by common platforms and standards.

“So we are trying to drive the ecosystem and we have put Java into the middle of our strategy,” Sakaguchi said.

Green said that it is not technology but immersive user experiences that are driving the profound changes he talked about. Enterprises and CEOs are not the driving force, but ordinary consumers, whose attention content and service providers are now fighting for.

“There is a massive competition for innovation and immersive experiences, a competition for the [consumer’s] eyeballs,” he said.

To survive and thrive in this competition, content developers, creative artists and Java developers must collaborate more effectively and in ever shorter iterative cycles, according to Green.

Towards the end of the session, Green talked about GlassFish, which he said was an “amazing community program” (it is the most active of Sun’s open-source community projects). He highlighted the forthcoming modular third version of GlassFish (v3) and the add-on GlassFish Communication Applications Server, formerly known as SailFin. This add-on is based on Ericsson’s SIP servlet container, which the company donated to the SailFin project at JavaOne 2007.

Jörgen Odgaard, manager of Ericsson Mobility World Developer Program, sat among the front rows of the theater.

“It was great to hear that Sun’s strategy and vision are aligned with what we at the Developer Program are promoting” Odgaard says. “Green’s talk about delivering immersive user experiences across all screens of life is exactly what we refer to when we talk about converged multimedia services. He also clearly expressed the importance of stimulating the communication and multimedia ecosystem, which is exactly what we are doing as well. It’s good that our vision is shared by other players in the increasingly converged IT and telecom industries.”

Olle Blomberg

Neil Young’s archives