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Sun Microsystems Inc. and 3Com Corp. said they will offer a new version of Sun's Java programming lanaguage on 3Com's popular Palm Pilot handheld computer, a boost for Java in the consumer market.

Software developers seemed to greet the news with enthusiasm at Sun's JavaOne Developer Conference, snatching up all the 10,000 Palm Vs at the show at a discount price, already bundled with the new Java code.

"Hacking the Palm Pilots is just a rush," James Gosling, the creator of the Java language, a vice president and Sun fellow, told developers as part of the keynote address.

By creating a smaller version of Java to work within a small consumer device, Sun hopes that the growing army of Palm developers and current Java developers will create applications to run on the Palm Pilot's Palm operating system, instead of other devices running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE.

A game was the only application that Sun executives used in a demo on the Palm. Sun said it is holding a contest at JavaOne for the best Java applications for the PalmPilot.

Developers made up the majority of the attendees at the conference, where 20,000 visitors are expected. Many attendees were wearing casual geek attire of jeans and t-shirts and some were relaxing in bean bag chairs scattered around San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, before the keynote.

Sun also said that the new smaller version of Java, called Java 2 Micro Edition, can also be used to develop applications for TV set-top boxes, screenphones, wireless pagers and cell phones and other personal digital assistants.

Sun also said that Japan's NTT DoCoMo (NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc.) delivered the first prototypes of a Java-enabled wireless phone that can also access the Internet, which use the smaller version of Java. Plans to add Java applications to the wireless phone, called the i-mode, are under development for release at the end of 2000.

Java, which was launched in 1995, is a computer language that lets programmers develop applications once in Java that can run on a variety of other computer systems.

Most of Java's inroads to date have been in the corporate computing environment, where companies like International Business Machines Corp. use it as a way to glue together applications on customers' diverse computer systems.

But Sun executives said that many corporations are now using its new package of Java aimed at corporate users, called Java 2 Enterprise Edition, including IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., BEA Systems Inc., and GemStone Systems Inc.

One recent example was created in about two weeks by two privately held companies, GemStone Systems Inc. and Verve Inc.

The demonstration showed how a corporation could manage the complex process of ordering digital subscriber line service, communicating with three different vendors, using Verve's workflow engine written in Java, to manage the process.