Sun Microsystems has said it will increase its Irish software engineering force by nearly 50 per cent to fill its 40,000 sq ft European Software Centre extension, opened yesterday in Dublin's East Point technology park.

Mr Jon Kannegaard, Sun's US vice president and general manager for Java software, said Sun will recruit an additional 100 engineers to the site. Dublin is already the largest of its 20 engineering centres outside of company headquarters in Silicon Valley and "one of the largest engineering investments made by the company". Sun employs 225 engineers in Dublin, who carry out software development, localisation and system test work for the European market.

"Sun is putting more of its engineering outside the US," Mr Kannegaard said. "Silicon Valley has no monopoly on smart, intelligent, energetic people." High-level Java development is one of the focus areas for Sun engineers in Dublin. Mr Kannegaard, who is also in Dublin for Sun's Global Engineering Conference, said that although Java created little revenue for Sun, it remained a vital part of the company's vision for the future of computing.

Java is a computer programming language invented by Sun which allows software developers to write a single software application which will run on different operating systems. Usually, developers must write a separate version for each different operating system. The language is freely available to developers, but Sun charges a licensing fee to companies that incorporate the Java Virtual Machine into their products - a tiny program which allows Web browsers or devices such as mobile phones to run Java applications.

Mr Kannegaard said Java began life as a program used mostly for creating animations on Web pages, but Sun quickly realised it was "killing a fly with a hammer". Now, the company sees it as "the perfect glue" for sticking together all the varied types of computers and operating systems a company uses, he said. Java has also become a leading language for creating Web applications. He said demand for Java would remain high because companies continued to use a wide range of different servers - large computers which hold programs accessed by many users across a computer network.

Sun is betting that Java will help keep the market upbeat for their own servers and their proprietary version of the Unix operating system, called Solaris.

Mr Kannegaard said people would increasingly use Java and Internet-enabled devices to access information on computer networks, rather than stand-alone computers.