Q&A: James Gosling, the father of Java

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James Gosling is somewhat of a celebrity in the IT world. Heralded as the father of Java, the Sun Microsystems vice president and fellow is still as busy as ever and remains grounded enough to want to talk to and interact with the developer community without a massive entourage eradicating anyone who tries to make eye contact with him.

IT PRO was lucky enough to get some time with James while he was in London this week for Sun's annual user conference. We wanted to find out what it is that makes him tick and pick his brains about some of the issues facing his creation and what makes the Java development community one of the biggest knowledge sharing success stories of our time.

You were working on a Sun project code named Green when you and your peers Patrick Naughton and Mike Sheridan created Java. Your mission was to find out what the next wave of computing was going to be. Looking back have you achieved what you set out to?

Mike was the business guy in the crowd and he wanted to figure out what forces were pushing technology.

Back then we wrote up this document that was a set of use cases of what we felt would happen. It's actually pretty spooky that most of the stuff we talked about back then has happened, even though at the time it seemed like extreme science fiction.

What sort of predictions did you make?

The big one was that networking was going out of the industrial or academic lab to everywhere. We talked to people doing everything from building elevators to consumer electronics. People were putting networking into everything.

But they were doing what the computer science people had been doing in networking for 20-odd years and copying all the old mistakes. So we ended up with these two lists which we smouldered together. The response to pretty much everything on our list was people thinking we were mad, not because it didn't work but because it wasn't economically feasible.

Obviously the public birth of Java in 1995 was a key milestone for you career-wise and for the industry at large. Aside from the release of Java 2 in 1998, what else would you draw out as particularly memorable times?

It's actually pretty hard to pick milestones as so much has happened. If I had to pick two, I'd say it Java enterprise software catching hold and then people starting to put Java in mobile phones. We had been working with phone companies for about a decade and then when - finally - some of them started doing the right thing, we were like "Yeah!"

For most people milestone tend to be the first time something becomes publically visible. But for the people behind the science the milestone isn't the end of the project as you slog away to get something to happen and then the thing takes on a life of its own.

For many people, the beauty of Java lies in its mission statement that you can write once and use everywhere. Why do you think it is so appealing?

I kind of like the flip version of that: Learn once, work anywhere. You'll find lots of Java developers around the world. They do a bit of scientific programming, enterprise programming, web front end, cell phones and embedded programming. People get to move around pretty frequently. It makes life much more interesting as you don't get stuck in a rut.

And there are lots of reasons why businesses like Java. The fact that they have a consistent, intellectual framework where they can think about all the different facets of their network development and put them all together is [appealing]. It creates a common way of thinking whether it's a point-of-sale (POS) terminal, database, the computer that runs your business of software on mobile phones. It's frightening how many people 'get it.'

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