Sun To Create Apple Like Java App Store

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems in his latest blog talks about Sun’s plans to create an application store for Java. The project is code named Project Vector. It is unclear whether Oracle will support the project after the Oracle-Sun merger. However considering that Schwartz is writing about it at this time, you would expect him to be quite sure of Oracle support.

Project Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we’ll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world’s largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX. What kinds of companies might be interested?

If you talk to a Fortune 500 company or a startup, pretty much everyone craves access to consumers – which is the one problem we’ve solved with the Java platform. Most folks don’t think of Sun as a consumer company, and largely we’re not, but our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it’s also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers – basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.

How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience.

src- schwartz blog

However already JavaWorld has declared that Project Vector is the biggest Java news that nobody cares about. In his article Josh Fruhlinger says that the reason for the cold response to Project Vector is

Unless the economics of the Java Store will be very different from the App Store (Schwartz does mention that developers will be able to “bid for position on our storefront,” which presumably involves paying money to Sun), this won’t necessarily be a great money-making scheme…

Or maybe there’s a simple explanation: everyone just thinks that Jonathan Schwartz is a lame duck CEO and Oracle doesn’t really have a lot of interest in desktop Java, so this initiative will be stillborn.

src – javaworld

Is an App store relevant to Java developers most of whom work on enterprise solutions? Would the Java App Store make it big?