Java is an incredibly successful toolset - but what is it really and how did it get to be so popular?

To understand what it is and how it got this way you have to start with the problem it was meant to solve: manufacturers working on digital consumer products like cell phones and set top boxes (intended to add internet connectivity to television sets) wanted their software to be updateable in use and able to run unchanged on multiple hardware generations.

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What are we to make of Sun Microsystems’ virtualization effort?
In the positives camp, we have a major vendor trying to build a real competitor to VMware. That’s probably a good thing for the virtualization market since the likes of HP, IBM and Dell appear content to more or less do what VMware, Citrix and Microsoft tell them.

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