As software developers arrive here this week for their annual West Coast conference, I seem to detect a decrescendo of industry interest in Java. Today, though, it looks to me as if the industry has passed a fork in the road, and the path it's chosen is not the one that Java's proponents envisioned. At the same time, the buying public is notably uninterested in ever more sophisticated applications.
Tight code is back in vogue, and hardware prices are seeking consumer-electronics levels.
What users want is not more features on their desktops, but richer services on corporate and Internet servers. Competitive advantage is coming from distributed applications, with computationally intensive database operations at the hub and small, cheap but responsive clients on the spokes of the IT wheel. A year ago, JavaScript was Java's junior partner. Tight code is back in vogue, and hardware prices are seeking consumer-electronics levels. I wonder if the Java break is over.