J A V A

"Only in Japan could we find 10 million devices running Java . " The significance was not lost on attendees. Japan has more mobile devices, mainly telephones, running Java than anywhere else in the world. This also explained why so many of the attendees and sponsors were in the mobile business.

Among the sponsors were J-Phone, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, and Fujitsu. Mr Gage, who has guided every JavaOne in the United States since the first in 1996, was on hand to get the Japanese developers excited. "Over the next 56 hours all of you will be tired, but you can sleep on the weekend. People must exchange ideas. You must meet people you don't know. If you are sitting with people from your own company, you should move," he said.

As if to emphasise the point that Japan is different, Mr Gage showed attendees how they could go to a Web page of Sun's Japanese office and download the entire programme of JavaOne in Yokohama, including maps. With a Java -enabled phone, he showed how it was possible to look at a map of the pavilion floor and see the name of the company as the cursor passed over the booth.

This is something people in the US cannot do. Toshiaki Sugawara, Sun's Japan president and representative director, said: "As far as the Japanese people are concerned, I think it would be fair to say that we have a culture of accepting new ideas."

Japan could well be called the gadget capital of the world and now computer technology and gadget technology is coming together. "We are now entering a new age of convergence. I think we can say that we in Japan are leading the world in this new mobile technology," he said. Much of this was due to an interest in gadgets, particularly small ones, but now even the services associated with this new technology were becoming more exciting. "We are no longer trying to create a personal digital assistant. We are looking for a brain assistant," he said. Jay Puri, Sun's vice-president for Asia-Pacific, put Java on mobile computing into an Asian context. "It is significant that the first Java conference outside of the US is in Japan.

There are 125 million mobile-phone users in China and six million of them already have Java ," he said. "China and [South] Korea are working towards a digital TV standard using Java . In Taiwan next year, there will be 24 million health care smart cards running Java ."

Rich Green, Sun's vice-president and general manager for Java and XML software, put the entire Java effort into a world-wide perspective and set the tone for the conference. Without mentioning the name of a competitor or product, he made it quite clear Java was a market leader because it was a technology that empowered people. "

In 1995, Java began on the desktop. Today we are moving away from a desktop-centric perspective. We are focused on Java running on anything with a digital heartbeat," he said. Mr Green also discussed the difficulty of setting up computer systems to handle large numbers of people. "Anticipating the load of Web sites is an increasingly difficult thing to do," he said, adding that Java was a technology that was built from the beginning to handle this kind of scalability.

Sun's J2EE ( Java 2 enterprise edition software platform) had become a benchmark standard, he said.

"The J2EE platform has 90 per cent of the market share for enterprise computing," he said.

Mr Green also praised Asia, especially Japan, for being in the forefront of the mobile movement. "The wireless world is exploding in Asia. There are over 7,000 applications running on Java on wireless in Asia," he said.

"By 2003, there will be more than one billion Java Cards in the world. "Also by 2003, there will be more Java -enabled devices than personal computers. More than 10 Java devices are sold every minute in Japan." At a time when the rest of the world is in economic difficulties and the personal computer market is stagnant, Asia may come to the rescue with mobile devices. Sun certainly would like to think so.

John Gage, chief researcher at Sun Microsystems