Growing Revenue for Desktop Java
I was reading Jonathan Schwartz’s
latest blog entry about JavaFX reaching 100 000 000 downloads. That’s
really impressive, but what I liked even more about the article are
some remarks about client side Java:
“First, freely distributed, open source software will continue to create enormous revenue opportunities for those that understand the underlying business model - as an example, the Java business for Sun, last quarter, delivered more than $67m in billings, up nearly 50% year over year. On an annualized basis, that means the Java client business (as distinct from the Java server business) is now a multi-hundred million dollar business, opening doors for Sun, and the Java community, across the planet. All built on freely available runtimes and source code. Free as in beer, free as in speech, and free as in market. ” (Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog)
That’s really fantastic news and it really matches my impressions about the adoption of Java on the desktop here in my small world. The number of companies building their desktop applications with Java is really growing here in Germany. Recently I’ve been talking to a publisher about his experience, and he said they see a growing demand especially for books about RCP Platforms. Sold books on a subject are a good indicator for where the market is going… and our local JUG has become some kind of a job market over the last weeks: "all the poor former Sun and IBM employees", you might think! But the opposite is true: companies are sending their job offerings, looking for Java developers by the dozen. It’s really amazing to see all this happening despite the financial crisis… Looks to me like Java (on desktop & Server) is stronger than ever.
From http://eppleton.sharedhost.de/blog/?p=470
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(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Mike P(Okidoky) replied on Fri, 2009/02/20 - 11:52pm
Indeed. What took people so long. Java rocks, Java2D rocks, and yet year after year after year, people just didn't make the connection. The Batik SVG renderer looked promising for a bit, but it's more of an output format, something you print to, kind of.
Personally, I think JavaFX is not quite *IT* though.
Jeroen Wenting replied on Mon, 2009/02/23 - 2:00am
We've all seen inflated download figures used to drive shareprices or get more downloads ("it is that popular? Wow, I must try it too"), but this is ridiculous.
As to out of work programmers, you ain't seen nothing yet (to quote Ronald Reagan). While for some (the highly experienced ones mainly, and those with publications to their name), the job offers will continue to pour in, expect for many the reality to be worse than that of the .com crunch in '01/'02, forcing a LOT of them to leave the profession or at least spend quite a while on the dole, looking for work that's simply not there. The real problems in the jobmarket are only just beginning after all. Companies could survive last year on existing projects and budgets, it's 2009 and 2010 that will see a major drop in contracts and new projects, a major RIFfing in existing groups. Of course that leads to headhunters pulling hard on the top-5% of people, as they're going to be needed to cover the arses of project managers forced to do the same work with 20-30% less manpower (and thus need higher quality people). Don't however expect salaries and benefits to go up more than marginably, the money isn't there, you should be happy to have a job at all (if not now, then by the end of the year that will be the reality for most of us).
Karl Pagan replied on Mon, 2009/02/23 - 6:14pm
Flash has dominated the web. Until we see JavaFX ads accepted by webmasters to the same level as Flash ads then I will have serious doubt about the ability of Java to become a ubiquitous development platform. The popularity of a platform is vitally important since it is a business risk to continue to develop a system if the cost of hiring developers to maintain it is expected to increase. For Java to begin to snowball it must be popular with users as well as developers.
For consistency Silverlight / WPF has the potential to steamroll its way into the business world and overtake Flash/Java for a ubiquitous business front-end. Historic errors in Java support on MacOS may have irreversibly damaged its market share (and any Vista / Windows 7 errors will further damage it). If JavaFX / SoyLatte sufficiently fills in the gaps before 32-bit macs are obsolete and Java 7 hits the ground with few significant Vista/W7 issues then there is a chance for Java to improve.
Downloads are great... but until JavaFX technology starts showing up in my browser on a daily basis I will restrain my optimism.
George Jiang replied on Mon, 2009/02/23 - 9:47pm
Toni Epple replied on Tue, 2009/02/24 - 4:55am
@karlthepagan: This post is not about JavaFX, but about the Java Client business in general that is creating revenue for Sun and others. This revenue is not yet generated by JavaFX but mainly by Swing.
@george.jiang: Regarding market share on the Desktop: Swing is the most popular GUI Toolkit (and growing).
Regarding JavaFX: The best strategy for Sun in my eyes would be to build on the many Swing developers out there instead of designers. JavaFX should be designed to be called from and integrated with Swing (right now there are only hacks allowing to do that), not only the other way round. This would give a boost to Swing and Desktop Java and they could get a lot of developers in their boat and allow for a slow transition to JavaFX as the main Toolkit. Designers are free to join in at any point, and they will when there are many applications built with JavaFX.
Toni Epple replied on Tue, 2009/02/24 - 9:14am
in response to:
Jeroen Wenting
Jeroen Wenting replied on Wed, 2009/02/25 - 3:51am
Working for a company developing software on a contract basis (and supporting environments) we're seeing a sharp drop in new tenders combined with increasing difficulty in getting existing contracts extended (and those that do get extended often bring in less money as hourly rates have to be reduced and manpower commitments reduced while of course delivering the same service).
Many customers are consolidating, deciding to retain their existing hardware and software for a while longer rather than invest in replacement systems. The old "if it ain't broke, don't replace it" is creeping into the market for computer systems, replacing the old cycle of automatically replacing everything every 2-3 years.
Open source is totally irrelevant in this. While we do get questions from customers about it (mainly for including JBoss instead of WebLogic or OC4J as an application server), so far those tenders have never yielded a single sale. The cost difference isn't so much that it's going to matter much. When a project has a total pricetag of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Euros, saving a few thousand by picking JBoss instead of WebLogic isn't going to make a splash (especially if the customer nor us has a trained support system in place for JBoss, thus making for expensive training of sysadmins, at least part of which will create pressure on the project budget and timing).
Eclipse and Netbeans aren't going to make a difference either. The customer never sees the IDE the programmer uses, so it doesn't matter to him what's being used (and if he does want to dictate it, do you really want to deal with him? He's likely to be going to try and micromanage everything, delaying the project and leading to cost overruns).
We're still hiring, but slowly and carefully and mostly to compensate for people leaving. And we're lucky in that, many companies around us are cutting back, often seriously, and especially in temp workers, contractors, and other non-permanent staff.
Toni Epple replied on Wed, 2009/02/25 - 3:39pm
Hi Jeroen, I don't agree with you. There will probably be a decline in Jobs, but in the last months the demand for Java developers has been growing:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java&l=&relative=1
George Jiang replied on Wed, 2009/02/25 - 5:33pm
in response to:
Toni Epple
You need to qualify "the most popular" with "Java" as Swing is the most popular Java GUI Toolkit. My original statement stands.
Toni Epple replied on Thu, 2009/02/26 - 2:27am
Jeroen, did you follow the link behind my "the most popular GUI Toolkit"?
Here it is again: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/hansmuller/archive/2005/10/official_swing.html
"Java Swing with 47% use, has surpassed WinForms as the dominant GUI development toolkit, an increase of 27% since fall 2004."
George Jiang replied on Sat, 2009/02/28 - 4:36am
in response to:
Toni Epple
That's not what I saw on the job ads using Winform or Swing as keywords. And Swing was invented in the days of VB5 and was directly competing against VB6.
It definitely suprises me Swing had a bigger market share than WinForm in 2005, two years after the inception of Winform 1.1/.NET 1.1.