Sun Microsystems has shelved plans to take its JavaOne developers conference to India or China after a strong turn-out at an event in Japan last year and concerns over whether the event could be financially successful in those countries.

For the next international JavaOne event, Sun will return to Yokohama in Japan, the company announced Tuesday. The conference will take place from Sept. 25 to 27 at the Pacifico Yokohama conference and exhibition center, the same venue where the event took place last year.

The event was the first JavaOne conference to be held overseas and, during a keynote speech, Chief Researcher John Gage said China and India were both likely to host JavaOne in 2002, in addition to the regular show in San Francisco. The latter show is currently taking place.

"Many people came to JavaOne in Japan and it was so successful," said Reiko Eto, a spokeswoman for Sun in Tokyo. "When we talked about China and India, Japan was a candidate as well and so we decided to hold the next event in Japan."

One of the main reasons behind the switch was financial. The events are run by Key3Media in association with Sun and there were concerns over whether Chinese developers and companies would be put off by the relatively high prices for admission and exhibiting, she said. At present, plans beyond the Japan event later this year extend only to the next U.S. event in San Francisco in 2003.

The China event was to have been part of an effort by Santa Clara, California, based Sun to promote Java in China.

Development work using the write-once, run-anywhere language is already taking place but Sun needs to get developers together to give Java an extra push, said Gage.

"The hard part is letting people meet each other and so one of the main functions of JavaOne in China will be to bring together all those developers in China that don't know each other," he said.