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Join For FreeFor over nine months the Java world has been waiting with bated breath
for definitive information about the future of Sun's software and
hardware portfolios. That day has arrived! Today Oracle held a five
hour live webcast outlining their high level strategies for Sun's
entire product line. The webcast was recorded and broken up into topics for easy consumption.
As a Java developer and Sun customer, I am very excited about Oracle's
acquisition of Sun and their plans for the software. I have summarized
the topics that interest me:
The Sun brand and logo live on! All the pictures of hardware,
slides, the sun.com and oracle.com websites, etc. show the Sun logo
above the Oracle logo. I'm really glad they are keeping the brand
because it makes it easier for me to warm up to Oracle.
JavaOne lives on! JavaOne will somehow run at the same venue and
same time as Oracle OpenWorld on September 19-23 2010. Call for papers
will be open soon. Also, Oracle will be expanding JavaOne to Brazil,
Russia, India and China!
The JCP lives on! Oracle believes in the value of a community
process to develop standardized APIs. I don't think they mentioned any
specifics about process changes, or if there would be process changes.
NetBeans lives on!
JDeveloper remains Oracle's strategic IDE for Oracle middleware, and
they will continue to develop Eclipse tooling. However, Oracle wants to
make NetBeans the best IDE for Java SE, Java EE, Java ME and Java FX.
They also see value in the NetBeans platform and want it to be the best
as well. They want developers to have choice, and will make sure that
JDeveloper, NetBeans and Eclipse all have excellent support for Oracle
middleware. They see opportunities for sharing features, such as
porting NetBeans' Matisse Swing GUI builder to JDeveloper, and porting
some middleware support from JDeveloper into NetBeans. They will
increase resources on NetBeans development. I think that they will
focus more on Java platform technologies than on support for other
languages, and maybe expect the community to contribute for the other
languages. That makes me very happy because I'd much rather see focus
on Java SE, EE, ME, FX, etc. than on Ruby, PHP, Jython, etc. The
netbeans.org website and wikis will continue to be maintained. The
licenses stay the same.
GlassFish lives on!
GlassFish continues as the Java EE reference implementation, continues
to be open source, and continues to be commercially supported. For
example, a GlassFish V3 extended support contract is available until
December 2017. Oracle thinks that GlassFish and WebLogic Server are the
best Java EE application server offerings in the industry. All of the
supporting projects that make up GlassFish will also continue to
thrive. They have plans to share code between GlassFish and WebLogic,
possibly including management infrastructure.
HotSpot and JRocket are Oracle's strategic JVMs. Oracle will bring the best of both together over the coming months and years. OpenJDK 7 will be released this year.
OpenSSO, OpenDS, OpenESB, OpenPortal, and almost everything else live on.
I tuned into the live webcast for a few minutes and heard talks about
these products. I get the impression that Oracle wants to continue to
offer and sell Sun software products to smaller businesses, and offer
an upgrade path to their more expensive products as the company grows
or their needs change. I'm glad they see it that way because I for one
would never pay $25,000 per server for WebLogic with cluster support
when I could be using JBoss or another more affordable application
server.
Kenai.com for internal use only. Soon there will be an
announcement on kenai.com about it not achieving the expected usage
levels. Oracle thinks they still have a use for it, and will use it
internally. They will continue to improve it, and might one day offer
it to the public again, but no promises.
Sun's public cloud is closed effective immediately.
I guess they want enterprises to buy hardware instead. They talked
about Sun's huge amount of work in creating virtualization technologies
to make the public cloud a reality, and Oracle sees tremendous value in
that work. They want to help enterprises evolve their datacenters to
private clouds and/or hybrid clouds using these technologies. Sun has
datacenter management software from the operating system layer down to
firmware upgrades and hardware provisioning. Oracle has the equivalent
management software for middleware and up. They now have an end-to-end
cloud solution to sell you. They referred to it as "cloud in a box".
There is much more to talk about, but I think I've covered the most
important bits for most Java developers. I am picturing many pessimists
and Sun haters flapping around the floor like fish in frustration
because they were hoping to see the death of NetBeans, GlassFish, the
JCP, SPARC, JavaOne, Solaris, and anything that came out of Sun. Nope,
not going to happen. In related news, SpringSource's dmServer is in the
process of being moved to the Eclipse foundation soon after VMWare bought the company :)
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