Since childhood Java has meant a lot of things to me, at first having been brought up on an endless supply of Luis L'amour western paper backs Java was the cup of brew over which cowboys swapped trail lore in the wild wild west, throwing the dredges of Java into the camp fire was the ultimate symbol of machismo. Then one graduated to the edge of the seat thrillers by Alistair McLean and java was part of the title of one of his unputdownable chiller "South by Java Head", in the World War classics Java was part of the exotic South East consisting of Java and Sumatra. "Java" was also the way one was asked to leave in the Marathi language. So having come to grips with so many uses of the word "Java" when "Oak" was rechristianed as Java one was pleasantly reminded of the associations of the past with this one word having so many memories attached to it.
That Java was first considered to be the language which would enable all the smart house hold machines to talk across platforms, this was the strong point of Java it's cross platform capabilities or rather platform independent character. This very ability took this offspring of C and C++ away from its intended use to service the Internet explosion. This was the golden age of Java working across networks and platforms. Java thus was the language of the kitchen cabinet, which became the lingua franca of the World Wide Web.
Java has been a boon for the software engineers who having learned it on the Windows NT environment here are able to work in the US environment, which is predominantly Unix, based since Java was the same on both the platforms. The InfoTech related boom experienced by India is largely thankful to the versatility of Java.
If somebody talked to me about Java beans I would conjure up the image of shinny rounded rich dark brown coffee beans and their rich aroma would fill the room, similar to the aromas wafting from South Indian kitchens as freshly ground beans of Java were brewed into the famous decoction of the Madras Coffee every day at breakfast time. Who would know that Java beans would be far more recognizable as software plug ins.
The ease with which Java beans could be reused, as plug and play bits of software pasted while writing programs, with out having to rewrite the entire code over and over again every time a similar function had to be carried out.
On the "Mahatma on the World Wide Web Project" we are using the JDBC to handle the vast database we are talking of over 250,000 printed pages of text, 15000 photographs, 5 hours of video and 48 hours of audio, all this will be managed and a smart search engine also created using Java will enable our users to customize the search according to their specific needs and thus explore the database. All this is made possible because of the versatility of Java.
Java is human friendly technology which would have met with the approval of Mahatma Gandhi since it is versatile, it takes care of many things without the need to become over technological, two being platform independent it would work in all environments just like Satyagraha and above all its simplicity the corner stone of the Mahatma's philosophy.
When Scot McNealy of Sun put the animation of the steaming cup of coffee on computer screens all over the world, be it the PC world or the Macintosh one, the world woke up to the power of Java as its hot brew counter part wakes up the world every day.
CAFEBABE dances on flirting with all, across the world of Information Technology and Java and Java Beans take on a whole new meaning. Tomorrow's children are going to react to "South by Java Head" as a software manual and Cowboys swapping tales over a hot cuppa Java as engineers swapping trade secrets and the aromatic Java Bean is going to be called a small software plug in.
When India's Computer Guru asked me to write a foreword for his book on Java I was intimidated first by the fact that I was adding on to the writings of a master and second by the fact that my association with the different meanings to the word Java had been turned on their head. What you are about to read is a serious insight into what makes the CAFEBABE swing so this is where the fun stops. As the cowboys would say to each other as they swigged the last of the "Hot Cuppa" and threw the dredges on to a dying fire "Lets catch some shut eye partner, cause tomorrow is another drive".