Amazon Web Services sets a lure for Java programmers

Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.

Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: “It’s time for a change. I’m leaving Boeing Defense (nee Liquid Robotics), with many fond memories. Today I start a new Adventure at Amazon Web Services.”

IDG News Service

He gave his title at AWS as “distinguished engineer” in an update to his LinkedIn profile. Of his work there, he would only say that he would be “wandering around.”

Gosling began work on what would later become Java in the early 1990s, while working at Sun Microsystems, and continued its development until the company’s April 2009 acquisition by Oracle. He left a year later, frustrated that his role had been reduced to that of an evangelist for Java, with the engineering decisions concerning it taken elsewhere.

After a brief stint at Google he moved to Liquid Robotics, where as chief software architect he programmed Waveglider autonomous ocean-going robots and processed their data in the cloud.

AWS welcomes Java developers, and offers a number of ways to run Java applications in its cloud, including single-click deployment from within the Eclipse IDE and automated deployment using its Elastic Beanstalk provisioning tool.

Gosling’s long experience with Java — and more recently with cloud data processing — will make him an asset at AWS.

A more intriguing possibility, though, would have been if he had landed not at AWS but at its parent company Amazon.com.

Amazon has been testing delivery by drone in the U.S. and the U.K., and is now licensed as an ocean freight shipper. With Gosling’s recent experience in building seagoing autonomous robots, the company would be a step closer to automating its global supply chain.