This year, the programming language-cum-development platform called Java turned 5. It now stands as one of the world’s most popular computer languages—and it continues to grow. The number of Java programmers is increasing by 10 percent per year, according to research company Evans Data.

Yet Java’s ascendancy hasn’t happened quite the way Sun envisioned back in 1996. In stark contrast to the swarm of Java applets populating the Web during its first years, client-side Java is almost nonexistent today. Instead, the language has moved behind the scenes, within the application servers that drive corporate websites—and increasingly, companies’ line-of-business applications.

During the past year, enterprises have taken Java to heart like never before. The language has matured. Tools for developing and deploying heavyweight Java applications are readily available from Borland, IBM and Sun. And developers now have a wealth of experience with the language.

"Java today has become mainstream," says Mark Driver, research director for Internet and mobile technologies at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. As a result, Driver says, Java applications are turning up everywhere from mainframes to mobile phones?and thanks to improved Java development and management tools, companies don’t necessarily need Java gurus to benefit from the language anymore.

Seeking Stability

At Detroit-based Ford Financial—the financial services arm of Ford Motor Co.—Java is central to the company’s migration away from a two-tier client/server model toward a three-tier thin-client architecture. While maintaining the company’s longstanding big-iron back end (IBM mainframes running DB2 databases), the company is now developing Java-based middleware applications that run on BEA Systems’ WebLogic Java application server. Ford’s applications, which handle such core business tasks as loan origination and account management, now have HTML client interfaces, eliminating the need to support client-side software in the company’s eight service centers and 150 dealer locations?and making it possible to extend these applications to consumers on the Web.

Ford has no regrets about basing its IT infrastructure on what five years ago was a brand-new technology. "We selected [Java] because it met our scalability, flexibility and value needs; and it has really proven itself," says Marcy Klevorn, director of customer branch and dealer systems for Ford Financial.

What’s more, Java now has only one serious competitor?Microsoft’s .Net framework?but that competitor is just getting out of the starting blocks.

Enterprise OS-1

What catalyzed Java’s corporate growth was the release in early 2000 of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Not a product, but a set of standards and procedures, J2EE formalized a framework for building multitier Java applications, using technologies such as servlets (Java applets that run on a server), Enterprise JavaBeans to exchange data and application objects, and Java server pages (JSP) to generate HTML for Web-based applications.