In a wide-ranging interview, Adam Bosworth, chief architect and senior vice president of BEA Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., talked to eWEEK senior writer Darryl K. Taft last month and got candid about his plans for XML at BEA, competing with Microsoft, BEA's impact on making Java development easier and lots of other good stuff.
eWEEK: Simplicity in tools is an issue on everybody's mind today, particularly with BEA and your Workshop product. How much of an impact do you think you've had on making Java development easier?
BOSWORTH: Well, I think we've had a huge impact on making it easier, which is to say... I'm going to make a very aggressive assertion. I would argue that there were really only about 500,000 people who could effectively use J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] before Workshop. There were obviously more people who could program in Java and there were obviously more people who could use JSPs [JavaServer Pages]. What I'm saying is the people who could actually make use of J2EE to develop true enterprise computing, it was the systems programmer crowd. That's who we were selling to. And I believe we truly have made it possible for the corporate developer, the applications developer to play in that and that means there's more like 5 million people. And what's more is because of the two-way views we've let them work collaboratively with the business user. Now the effect of that is measured in different ways. We just released the product not too long ago and I don't know yet what the impact will be in terms of what everyone does. I think it's interesting that other products are now starting to try and repeat what we've already shipped.
News source: eWeek
