Sun pushes “Pure Java” and Microsoft complains about JDK 1.1

Sun president Ed Zander gave an “impassioned pitch” for his company’s “100% Pure Java” initiative yesterday during his keynote at the Internet Expo conference in San Jose, California. Recalling the splintering of UNIX, he encouraged attendies to stick with the “write once, run anywhere” platform indepence of Java.

Zander attacked Microsoft and its ActiveX technology specifically, and rebuked information on Microsoft’s new ActiveX security Web site:

“Microsoft said the problem is with applets. That’s not right. It’s ActiveX,” Zander said. “Demand portability and ubiquity from your vendor. It’s up to you to make sure that extensions made to Java don’t violate APIs.”

Microsoft, of course, has their own take on the story and they’re not too happy with the perception that they are “ruining” Java.

In related news, Microsoft claimed today that Java applets written with the new Java SDK (version 1.1, just released this week) will not run on Internet Explorer. They charge that JavaSoft specifically built Microsoft incompatibility into the product.

“They are violating a very specific contractual obligation,” said Charles Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the Microsoft Java team. “I would not rule out legal action.”

JavaSoft claims that proprietary Microsoft code is causing the incompatibility:

“What they are saying is extremely untrue,” said Lisa Poulson, spokeswoman for JavaSoft. “They are just making this up.