Microsoft: Java is just a programming language

During Microsoft's Windows Platform briefing Wednesday, group vice president of platforms and applications Paul Maritz finally made a firmpublic statement about Microsoft's opinion of Java. "It's just a another programming language."

Maritz was reacting to recent claims by Sun that Microsoft is bound by aJava license to ship it's Java Foundation Class (JFC) libraries. Microsofthas its own set of similar libraries known as the Application FoundationClasses (AFC) that works with Java and the company has no plans to shipJFC too.

"Java is a good evolution of C++, it keeps a lot of the good and gets rid of the bad," Maritz said. "However, Sun is trying to associate with Java a set of libraries written in Java and put JFC forward as a solution for programs to run on all the world's operating systems."

Maritz pointed out that for the JFC to become as useful as existing OSAPIs, it would need to grow and bloat into a Java OS. Microsoft has noplans to support that at all.

"We have no intention of shipping another bloated OS and shoving it down the throats of our users," Maritz said at the mention of a JavaOS runningon top of Windows. "If an operating system adds a new feature, and [the OS]has a large market share, then it is economically crazy not to take advantage of that," he said. "Look at a lot of the Java applications out there: They are 100% impure Java because they have to take advantage of theoperating system.