Sueltz’s day in the Sun

IN NOVEMBER I sent an open letter to Pat Sueltz, president of software products and platforms at Sun, about its posture regarding Java and XML. The sentiments expressed — Java won, declare victory, move on, and evangelize XML — found support from an interesting mix of industry players. “Makes sense to me,” said open-source leader Tim O’Reilly. “Sun is clinging to an old view of the world, one where Java would become the uber-operating system,” said SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) co-author Dave Winer.

And then there was Sueltz’s reply. “I don’t think you can ever say a technology ‘wins,’ ” she wrote, “but if you are going to pick a winner, I’m glad it’s Java.” She suggested a visit to her Sun office to chat further, concluding that she’d like to show me “how Java provides a services environment that already goes way beyond Web services.”

As InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard and I settled into chairs around a table in her small office, I told Pat that “going way beyond Web services” raised a familiar red flag: marginalizing Web services (and SOAP and XML by implication) as minor players in the larger drama that is J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition).

“I do have it as a subset of network computing,” Sueltz admitted as she drew on a whiteboard. “That comes from our heritage in part, but it doesn’t preclude XML. XML and Java are like the yin and the yang — they go together, they’re both very important.” Pat watched some of this from the outside at IBM, when XML took off in the late ’90s with significant contributions from Sun’s Jon Bosak.

For Microsoft, Sueltz suggested, XML was of paramount importance — a ticket out of the Windows client ghetto. “Microsoft got trapped a bit on the desktop and wasn’t quite in the Internet space. And then they got into XML. They did a very clever job of saying, ‘XML is the next [thing] — we need dynamic HTML, we need XML’ — and they positioned it vis-à-vis Java.”

“Some people at Sun, some of whom are not with us any more, rose to that challenge,” continued Sueltz, “and instead of reacting and saying, ‘What are you talking about? It goes hand-in-glove,’ took the bait. The brand was just getting started and they were going, ‘Oh, we’ve got to defend it.’ ”

When Sueltz came on board in October 1999, one of the first things she dealt with was Sun’s position regarding SOAP. “I said, ‘Why are we resisting SOAP? This is like getting into the discussions about resisting CORBA and IIOP [Internet Inter-ORB Protocol]. Some of this stuff doesn’t look like we’re playing the way we espouse we’re playing.’ ”

Next, Sueltz stepped up and took the hit because Sun withdrew its submission of Java for standards consideration. “I said, ‘Are we really going to submit this to the standards body? Let’s just call it as it is. If we’re not going to do it, quit declaring it.’ ” Instead, she backed the Java Community Process, which by most accounts from Sun’s partners (and competitors) has been largely successful.

Now Sueltz took to the whiteboard again, mapping out the complex relationship between the pieces of the Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) puzzle as a series of concentric circles — an end-to-end vision of LDAP directories, Web, integration, and app servers all underpinned by J2EE. “You are absolutely right, Steve. I can say we did it,” said Pat with a great deal of pride and even some sense of surprise.

It’s back to the future, that good old vision of the network as the computer. “If I went back right now for an ad campaign, I’d go back to ‘The Network is the Computer.’ And really the computer is becoming the network; it’s changing,” Sueltz said.

“And just when you guys aren’t quite emphasizing that anymore is when the rest of the world is starting to figure that out,” Vizard joked ironically.

Sueltz acknowledged that Sun may have missed the opportunity to capitalize on its own success.

“We’re human too,” Sueltz replied. “I disagree with some of the stuff that I’ve seen out of Microsoft, that it is all Web services. Actually there are new things that are still coming, but Web services is where it is playing right now. They clearly have made a terrific step, and we didn’t capitalize on it.”

“It’s still evolving, but we did it,” she repeated. “Now there are new things that we have to take into account for that platform, and that includes XML, which is why I combined Java and XML under Rich Green.” This was news to us. “I never announced to you guys publicly, but I did it a year ago — in April. Ask to see his card; it says ‘Java and XML software.’ ”

Indeed it does. A few days later, Rich Green, Sun’s vice president and general manager of Java software and XML technologies, presided over a celebration of J2EE 1.3 compatibility. After his keynote, I asked him about his card, with the words Java and XML in equal weight beneath his name, and why he sent a different message with his presentation. There, after all in the middle of his slide deck, was a huge map of the Sun architecture, with pervasive clients on the left, a huge J2EE object in the middle, and a small XML in the lower right.

His response? Green promises to remove that slide from his presentation the next time, perhaps at J2EE 1.4 Compatibility Day.

For Pat Sueltz, it’s yin and yang. For others both above and below her, Java is the Sun and XML is a planet that revolves around it. Sun One needs to speak with one voice.

That’s what “write once, read many” really means.

Source: www.infoworld.com