·a replacement for Windows in the enterprise, the kind of dollar-intensive desktop buy-in championed by Oracle Corp.'s Larry Ellison and disdained by conservative big business; and

·a still nascent set of Jini discovery and lookup protocols that enable distributed processes, including automated access to widely disparate devices across a network (see "Peering Into the Network Hive," page 76).

Java may not be perfect, but its lightning-quick evolution in a 36-month span makes it a genuine phenomenon in the history of development languages and platforms.

Java development already is mainstream in the top 20 percent to 30 percent of IT organizations, according to analyst David Smith of Gartner Group, who adds that it's on the verge of becoming mainstream in the rest. Similarly, Forrester Research finds that almost half of Fortune 1,000 companies already use Java, with nearly 20 percent considering it important or critical. Forrester predicts that by 2000, nearly half of the Fortune 1,000 will consider Java important or critical, with 80 percent relying on it as their dominant application development language.

Java may even prove to be as strategic to Microsoft as it is to Sun. While Microsoft's ultimate vision may be that of a singular, universal Windows platform, the company has been forced to pay attention to non-Windows platforms. And to move effectively into enterprise distributed networking, Microsoft needs Java. As long as a competing vision exists, Microsoft must retain some degree of Java one-upmanship.

So, when Microsoft adopted Java, it wrapped pieces of the language, its tools and its virtual machine in a huge bear hug. But it bared its sharp teeth when it came to the heart of its own territory--the Windows client interface and the distributed networking architecture mapped out in COM. This strategy of partial acceptance--the substitution of Microsoft's own APIs and distributed computing model method invocation--led Sun to go to court charging Microsoft with sullying Java's purity.

Java Spills Onto the Server
Microsoft's decision to stamp Java with its own brand raises concerns over Java on the client--where it is most widely deployed in business today. But at the same time, Java is picking up steam on the server, where it stands to make its most lasting imprint. Java is most noticeable on the server side in quick-to-build midtier applications that extend functionality, such as between clients and legacy databases and applications, for instance. Java is also showing up in less visible ways on the server, such as in its role as intermediary between older, back-end systems. Nike, for example, built a Java application that updates its enterprise resource-planning software with procurement information in real time.

Java helps many businesses, especially very conservative ones that still rely on terminal emulation, jump several technology hurdles at once. Rather than fashion new applications and retrain users, some businesses choose midtier servers that bring the mainframe to the desktop browser. As a result, emulation is rapidly approaching commodity status on these servers. The downside, of course, is getting servers to scale without spending a fortune, since they must handle emulation and pipe graphics to the client. Some companies also find great value in taking a once-complicated terminal emulation interface and simplifying it so that it can be used not only by sales reps, for example, but also by outside customers.

Java's simplicity goes a long way toward explaining its burgeoning popularity. Java makes it easy to extend sophisticated logic to the server while maintaining reliable performance characteristics. The enterprise consensus is that ordering apps based on Java is like prescribing Dexedrine for app production. Good Java programmers say they can increase productivity by a factor of two over C or C++ (read how GTE programmers are doing so at www.networkcomputing.com/919/919f1.html). And best of all, without the pointers and memory management headaches of C, the resulting applications are more stable, reliable and modular. That's reason enough for many companies to use Java, but managers also welcome Java's reputation for much greater portability than C or C++, the two primary languages that traditionally have been used for sophisticated enterprise applications that may one day need to be ported.