Kevin Bedell recently had the opportunity to talk with Sun Microsystems' John Fowler about open standards, Linux and Java, and Sun's contributions to the open source community.
John Fowler is chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems' Software organization. He manages an Advanced Development group and reports directly to Jonathan Schwartz's organization. John has been with Sun for 12 years, with experience in software development and most recently corporate strategy.
Prior to this appointment, John led technical strategy in Sun corporate, identifying leading technology trends and the companies creating these trends for minority investment and acquisition. John's group took a forward view on both hardware and software technology developments, identified companies that are complementary to Sun in specific areas, and sought to invest in these companies.
Prior to taking the technology position in the corporate group, John was director of engineering for the Sun Software Development Tools organization. Over the past 10 years, he has held a variety of positions, primarily engineering management, in Java Software, Solaris, Unix Desktop, and Graphics.
LWM: Thanks, John, for speaking with us. Being the CTO of Software at Sun Microsystems seems like a broad-ranging job. From my understanding of Sun, the big software initiatives happening there right now run around Java, Solaris, and Linux. What's your particular area of focus?
John Fowler: We're really focused on extending the ability to develop network applications through every part of the network. We believe that people are developing applications today that span from the data center, where your systems information is, all the way out to the identity card. So we have developed Java with partners to actually provide a network architecture for developing applications through the entire computing universe.
LWM: I remember the first time I encountered a Sun product, it was actually a Sun 3 Workstation based on a Motorola processor, and it was running BSD (Berkely Unix) 4.2.This was some number of years ago, but I remember that even then the idea behind Sun was the mantra of open systems?is that still where you're going?
Fowler: Yes. As you know from our early history, we picked up the Motorola 68000 processor and BSD and created the workstation. We've always been about taking some standard and open components and putting them together in particular ways to create solutions for customers, and so from the early, humble workstation days of open standards and workstations to today, a lot of these basics still continue to be the same. Open standards, an open development environment, and a combination of standard components and integration to build a solution. With Java we really look at the network as the system, that is, you develop applications today to really live on the network, and that's what Java and Web services enable you to do.
LWM: Speaking of Java and Linux...it seems that Java is now becoming the language of choice for enterprise development. I know a lot of people talk about C# being a growing language, but one of the biggest trends that struck me recently was that COBOL application development is finally beginning to fall off. I take that to mean that these big applications are finally being rewritten, and they are being written in Java for the most part. Is that what you're seeing?
Fowler: Yes. There's been a trend over the last few years where we've gone from a multiplicity of languages and development environments to two major ones ? C# and .NET from Microsoft, and Java and J2EE from Sun and Sun's partners. So most new enterprise applications development is done in those two areas. The basic difference is actually very straightforward. With Microsoft .NET you can build applications that can live in one environment ? that is Microsoft Windows; and with Java and J2EE you can build applications that span many operating systems, hardware platforms, and other environments. So your choosing something involves an entire industry as opposed to a single company.
