Sun builds world's biggest application store for Java

In a blog posting Jonathan Schwartz explained that the company would announce the details of applications store, codenamed Project Vector, at the JavaOne conference on June 2nd.

He said that with Java in use on most of the computing platforms around the world and the company was expecting about a billion users.

“Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world,” he said.

“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.”

Free and paid for Java applications will be submitted to Sun for evaluation and distribution in the store. Sun will also auction off positions on the store front pages to software companies.

“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,” he continued.