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The father of the decade-old Java programming language is urging the developers who made Java what it is today to make sure they're building Java for tomorrow's tech needs.

James Gosling, CTO, Java Enterprise and Development Group, Sun Microsystems, kicked off the Sun Tech Days Worldwide Developer Conference here today by urging developers to get involved with the Java community process and to use Sun's tools.

The Canadian-born Dr. Gosling told the capacity crowd of Java faithful that at some level Java is more than just a programming language.

Think of it as a conceptual framework that spans multiple implementations, including the enterprise, standard computing and embedded markets, he said. After all, the end to end nature of Java's conceptual framework allows developers to better understand how everything fits together, he added.

"Originally the marketing slogan for Java was write once, run anywhere," Gosling said. "The flip side, and that is often the one that is most important, is learn once, work anywhere."

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Gosling also brought up his other major contribution to the IT community: the Emacs source code editor. Gosling was the original author of Emacs for UNIX in 1981. GNU Emacs, a version still widely used in the open source community, is considered a "descendant" of Gosling's Emacs. (GNU Emacs was written by Free Software movement founder Richard Stallman.)

Gosling said he is "embarrassed" that Emacs is still around and widely used. He advised developers to adopt more modern tools like Sun's Java Studio Creator, Sun Java Studio Enterprise and Netbeans, all of which are now available for free. The modern Sun editors provide power through specialization and provide a more user friendly intuitive way to develop current applications.

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