Java growth in New Zealand doubles in four years

07.04.2006
Software developers are facing much more complexity compared with five years ago, says Matt Thompson, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s director of Technology Outreach and the corporation's open source program office.

Thompson, keynote speaker at Sun's developer conference held in Wellington last week, emphasizes the huge number of choices today's developers have.

'Five years ago they ran the shop. Today, they're driven by dollars and time.'

More than 130 Java developers attended the Wellington conference, the first of such size Sun has held in the capital. The company has now decided to alternate the annual event between Wellington and Auckland.

'My job is to educate developers so they understand where we're going, and to enable them with tools,' Thompson says. 'We make no money off the developers directly. Rather, we hope to make it when their applications are deployed, hopefully on our hardware and solutions.'

By solutions he means the Java enterprise system, the business stack on which the applications are built.