When you picked up this month’s copy of Linux Magazine, you probably noticed the cool tomcat staring at you on the cover. For those of you who are not already aware of this, Tomcat is the name of the Java servlet and Java server page technology that Sun Microsystems donated to the Apache project. (For more on Tomcat, see our feature story, pg. 28.)
When you picked up this month’s copy of Linux Magazine, you probably noticed the cool tomcat staring at you on the cover. For those of you who are not already aware of this, Tomcat is the name of the Java servlet and Java server page technology that Sun Microsystems donated to the Apache project. (For more on Tomcat, see our feature story, pg. 28.)
So why did we decide to feature Tomcat on the cover of Linux Magazine? Well, we’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the World Wide Web, the coming age of Web Services (see the article on SOAP, pg. 22), and Linux’s place in that future, and we’ve come to a realization: Linux needs Java and Java needs Linux.
In fact, both technologies and communities need each other more than they sometimes seem to realize.
You might ask, “Why does Java need Linux?” Well, look at the position Java is in today. Although Sun has done a terrific job of marketing Java as platform independent, that’s not entirely true. Sure, when you’re talking about embedded devices, it’s possible for Java to effectively serve as its own operating system, but on the server side, Java isn’t really independent at all. It relies on the platform it’s running on top of. And if that the platform is Windows, Java is at risk.
It’s no secret that Microsoft has little love for Java and wouldn’t mind if it just disappeared. In fact, .NET is in…
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