Dr. James Gosling, co-inventor of Java and CTO of Sun's Developer Platforms group, spoke with SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan on SYS-CON.TV at the tenth JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.

He talked about Java's birthday, its increasingly sophisticated uses, why he's spoken about it at length in Brazil, and his company's relationship with the open-source community. He also noted that his native country of Canada takes a measure of pride in knowing that one of its own was responsible for creating what may be one of the transformational technologies of the past decade.



James Gosling

SYS-CON Group Publisher Jeremy Geelan, who conducted the interview with Gosling, wished him a "happy birthday," in reference to observances of Java's 10th birthday at the JavaOne Conference this year. Gosling noted that in his opinion "Its’ everybody’s birthday." He expressed enthusiasm for his current work in real-time and the Java Programming Language's increasing use in real-time. He noted that Boeing executives were in attendance at this year's JavaOne, and that they are working to deploy Java in future navigational systems: "Java is the pilot that decides where to fly the thing," as he put it.

But Gosling expressed the opinion that "we've hardly begun (to develop Java's potential). There's so much in the networked world vision that we're (still) a long way from figuring out...it's getting much more fascinating." He noted that next-generation blueray laser DVD systems will be Java-enabled, providing "all kinds of active content. And part of this DVD spec (gives it) a network dimension, so you can download content into the player."




Gosling also expressed enthusiasm for the way the Brazilian government is integrating Java into applications that help all of Brazilian society. In particular, he talked about how the government committed itself to providing a cell phone to all citizens, especially the poorest, and then is providing Java-based applications to provide government services to them.

Prompted by Geelan to talk about blogging a bit, he said that he has written his own application, which he handed off to someone else for further development, and which can be found at http://bloged.dev.java.net

On the topic of open source, Gosling said "There's a lot to be said for open source, and there’s a lot to figure out. Open source is really great for community and collaboration." But he said it's been difficult to figure out the "thermodynamics," ie economics, of how to develop open-source applications. "It takes a lot of energy to produce software, and (we need to know) how does the software get supported? How do you (develop open-source and) pay your rent and buy lunch?"

The full interview can be found at: http://www.sys-con.tv/read/105017.htm