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While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.

Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster

Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.

Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster

Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

Like, there's only one Linux kernel, only one C compiler, only one bash shell.. only one Perl, only one Java...

You are correct that there are only one Linux kernel, but there are other free UNIX kernels you could use instead. When it comes to compilers both LLVM and GCC are widely used. (LLVM is used in Gallum3D, the new acceleration architecture for X, and in Shark, a CPU agnostic JIT for OpenJDK. A C frontend not based on GCC is in development) There are many shells. Ubuntu, a quite popular Linux distro, actually uses dash as default /bin/sh. While it's true that only OpenJDK (if I recall correctly) passes the TCK for Java you also have competing implementations like Harmony, what Google uses on Android. You have more competition on the parts of the Java stack that takes less time to implement.

... I.B.M. into the dominant supplier of high-profit Unix servers ...

Oh, how pleasent, what a smart move for IBM.

... and related technology.

Woh. Hold on. Wait. Please, I beg of you, save Sun's software from IBM's slow moving process and lack of usability.

I must confess that while I have used Solaris, the only thing I have ever cared about from Sun enough to bitch is Java and Java related thingies. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to fall apart if/when it transfers to IBM's hands and I certainly hope that the people involved in those projects stay there but if I look at the products of the two companies I must say that Sun is far better at Software.

This hasn't always been the case but let's look at web application servers. The free open source Glassfish container has been one of my favorites for development. Websphere, on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.

Although I'm sure you'd love to hear me bitch for hours about Rational products, I'm just going to say that I think competition is healthy and also I prefer Sun Software to remain Sun Software. I hope this deal falls apart. I've loved IBM's tutorials but do not care for their software.

Cool; where can I download the source for the Sun JVM to see what such an awesome VM implementation looks like? ;)

Here, and it's licensed under the GPL.

Who mentioned programming Java? Only your fouled-mouthed troll.

Cyberax was talking about running languages such as Python, Ruby or Lisp on the Java Virtual Machine. In turns out that many of the runtime techniques within HotSpot to speed Java can also be used to optimise the performance of others. Where not the case, special mechanisms are being added to bytecode to create a truly language independant VM.

Thanks to Red Hat, there's also an LLVM based backend for HotSpot in development, Shark.

By the way, for more up-to-date stuff regarding closures in Java (and Java language evolution in general), this thread, and also this poll linked from that thread, can be an interesting read.

I fall into neither of those python/ruby groups you mention... My understanding is that they've had to perform some magic behind the scenes with class loaders and reflection etc to obtain reasonable performance. Sun's hotspot vm doesn't support tail-recursion, so lisp dialect clojure has had to add language keywords to simulate it.

Sun have made some progress in this area by hiring some of the jruby developers, introducing new bytecodes and prototyping a new language independent vm.

I've heard great things about Lucene (guy at the company I used to work for swears by it, he used it for anything from searching B2B stores to biological indexing). Both Hibernate and Spring have support for this library.

I'm looking into adding search on my site so I should probably check it out. There's a new "In Action" book out for using the Hibernate Lucene add-on -- I might have to pick that up.

cut out the middleman, no need for jungledisk. I just hacked my own on-line backup solution.
There's some nice toolkits available. I used jets3t (see https://jets3t.dev.java.net/).

1. Create a list of files to backup,
2. compare list of checksums of these files with the ones on-line (stored in the S3 meta-data)
3. upload changed files
4. done

I'm currently at 0.22$ per month for about 4 GB of data.

Project Wonderland is a 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entire new worlds and new features in existing worlds.

Hopefully people will realise its potential.

Kind of hard to do that if you're running linux or solaris.

Would holding up JavaFX on 98% of desktops in hopes that Linux will get its multimedia act together really be in the interest of Sun or Java? If so, hold your breath and think "everything should be in Ogg" over and over again until you get your wish. The rest of us have better stuff to do. -- Editor, Java.Net . What this has to do with solaris is unclear.

They promise javafx is coming to linux and solaris, but they don't mention when. Sun promised the same thing with the 64-bit plugin TWO YEARS before it was released, so why should anyone hold their breath for javafx on linux or solaris.

Linux users may have a seat at the back of the bus with Adobe, but Sun doesn't want linux or solaris users to even get on the bus.

So the proof that the newly released JavaFX will fail is that you haven't been using it for building applications?

A high percentage of developers code on linux systems, and if you want that code to run on windows, you're primarily limited to java or browser-based applications (although GTK is starting to look appealing). Deploying java applet and webstart apps is a nightmare, but javafx is being trumpeted by Sun as a solution to this -- for windows and mac only. Note that you need to download javafx just to view the demos, so even though it was downloaded by a lot of windows/mac users doesn't mean that a high percentage of those downloads were by people wanting to develop javafx apps. So the problem isn't that the grandparent poster doesn't use javafx, it's that if you use linux, you CAN'T use javafx.

And it appears that that will be the case for quite awhile, because Sun has been purging comments from their blog post about javafx support on linux and solaris (all comments from December 6 and 7th are now missing, along with some others), and the editor of the java.net site says that Sun has "better things to do" than release a linux or solaris version of javafx.

That may not be "proof that JavaFX will fail," but it certainly doesn't help foster its adoption.

Sun can still turn things around if they release a 64-bit linux port of javafx. The 64-bit plugin technology is related to javafx, so maybe if and when Sun ever releases a linux version of javafx, it will be for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Linux has had a full-featured 64-bit Java plugin that even includes LiveConnect support for at least months via IcedTea, a special build by Red Hat of the official OpenJDK source tree. For example Ubuntu 8.10 ships this 64-bit plugin as the icedtea6-plugin package, which I have been using for the past 2 months. And, no, I am not talking about the GCJ or Blackdown Java implementations which are significantly more buggy or incomplete (lacks LiveConnect support).

What is new today is that Sun just released a development build of Java 6u12, build b02, which includes the 64-bit plugin. However technically we still have to wait for a couple months before 6u12 is officially released. But again you can already get a 64-bit plugin based on essentially the same source tree via IcedTea.

That sure sounds a lot like Sun's Project Looking Glass.

Also, how much do you use Java? If I just walked into Java, or the professor of my class just walked into Java, or the graphics guru TA for the course just walked into Java... would any of them have any idea of how to do it?

They'd use google, ffs. Apparently, a graphics is not tied to a resolution, so it just doesn't make sense.
Learning is so hard...

Why is it so difficult to understand that Google's Dalvik - an implementation of Java being used for free by mobile phone manufacturers - is a direct threat to Sun's J2ME? This is not some secret conspiracy theory - professional business analysts, who actually make a living from watching these kinds of things, have noticed the same thing.

"However, Google's move threatens Sun's business strategy, Mazzocchi said. He believes that Sun sees a bright future in the mobile market and hopes to earn revenue off the use of the Java virtual machine by phone makers. Google's plan diminishes that opportunity for Sun." source

"But with this you'll need to develop a separate application that's not standard. Unless Android becomes main stream and kills J2ME ..." source

This blog post from over a year ago proposes that JavaFX Mobile is just the next stage for J2ME to compete with Android.

I would assume so. OpenGL in applets has been possible for quite some time with JOGL (jnlp can use native libs). See here.

I wonder if this means Sun is going to pull out of Orbit and come up with some J2ME version of JavaFX?

Java FX Mobile was also released (but still in beta stage; FCS planned for next spring). Check Terrence Barr's blog. In fact, the mobile version is a big part of JavaFX's grand scheme. Deploy the exact same code on desktop, web and mobile devices - it's revolutionary and unique, for anything as rich as JavaFX.

Maybe you have not heard of OpenJDK?

There is also the open source virtual world wonderland built in java and based on the (also open source) darkstar

Considering the fact that Flash is essentially mandatory for many websites...

That's the crux of the issue -- web support on 64-bit systems. Adobe Flash has it, Sun Java does not.

By ignoring Bug 4502695 for over 5 years (and over 800 votes), Sun has just given the 64-bit webspace to Adobe. Why should anyone wait another year to see if a 64-bit java plugin is actually released when Flash has a 64-bit plugin now?

Way to go, Sun. You've killed JavaFX before it even got started, and strangled the attempts to resurrect the applet and web-start apps.

That's just bitchin'.

...but they can hardly do worse than Sun, from what I've heard about their management of OO.o.

Sun's management of both OpenOffice and Java is lousy. They don't listen to their users -- the Java bug-tracking and voting system is bogus, and OpenOffice is "primitive".

Read the threads linked to above to get an idea of Sun's utter cluelessness.

$18(-ish)/year for my ~12GB of photos/home-vids/documents, simple cron integration via things like https://jets3t.dev.java.net/ JetS3t's "synchronize", daily incrementals with weekly fulls. Couple of hours to setup, never spent time on it since (other than reviewing cron logs, occasionally testing retrieval). 'Nuff said.

because his Java apps use ridiculous amounts of memory and he has to find something else to blame :-)

Maybe. Maybe it's the codecs. http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=120199

How about glass tiles on a 100'x30' wall, or a 30'x75' wall?

I wrote the code, my brother in law did the hard parts.

Care to site any sources? I'm searching around, and can't find the technical docs or API's online. I did find posts on BD-J, and that xlets have to be signed to access the network. Given the fact that they were able to modify the download process without issuing new disks, it makes me think that they wrote the download code themselves. This seems to imply downloads are coded by developers.

Why not use something like a Project Wonderland https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/? It gives you application sharing (VNC on win32 and X on Linux, etc). Also gives you 3D audio, chat, an avatar, a whiteboard and even the ability to phone into the world from a landline (hardware allowing). You can customize the area, add photos using Flickr http://blogs.sun.com/wonderland/entry/flickr_friday. Worth considering IMHO.

Reminds me of Sun's Project Wonderland.

Project Wonderland:
Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems

http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=62

https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Project Wonderland relies on the following open source projects for key technologies.

Project Darkstar - provides the scalable, persistant server software infrastructure

jVoiceBridge - provides realtime immersive stereo audio with distance attenuation

Java 3D - provides the scene graph on which the 3D world and scene manager is built

Project Looking Glass - provides the 3D scene manager

https://sgs.dev.java.net/

https://jvoicebridge.dev.java.net/

https://java3d.dev.java.net/

https://lg3d.dev.java.net/

Reminds me of Sun's Project Wonderland.

Project Wonderland:
Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems

http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=62

https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Project Wonderland relies on the following open source projects for key technologies.

Project Darkstar - provides the scalable, persistant server software infrastructure

jVoiceBridge - provides realtime immersive stereo audio with distance attenuation

Java 3D - provides the scene graph on which the 3D world and scene manager is built

Project Looking Glass - provides the 3D scene manager

https://sgs.dev.java.net/

https://jvoicebridge.dev.java.net/

https://java3d.dev.java.net/

https://lg3d.dev.java.net/

Reminds me of Sun's Project Wonderland.

Project Wonderland:
Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems

http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=62

https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Project Wonderland relies on the following open source projects for key technologies.

Project Darkstar - provides the scalable, persistant server software infrastructure

jVoiceBridge - provides realtime immersive stereo audio with distance attenuation

Java 3D - provides the scene graph on which the 3D world and scene manager is built

Project Looking Glass - provides the 3D scene manager

https://sgs.dev.java.net/

https://jvoicebridge.dev.java.net/

https://java3d.dev.java.net/

https://lg3d.dev.java.net/

Reminds me of Sun's Project Wonderland.

Project Wonderland:
Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems

http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=62

https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Project Wonderland relies on the following open source projects for key technologies.

Project Darkstar - provides the scalable, persistant server software infrastructure

jVoiceBridge - provides realtime immersive stereo audio with distance attenuation

Java 3D - provides the scene graph on which the 3D world and scene manager is built

Project Looking Glass - provides the 3D scene manager

https://sgs.dev.java.net/

https://jvoicebridge.dev.java.net/

https://java3d.dev.java.net/

https://lg3d.dev.java.net/

Reminds me of Sun's Project Wonderland.

Project Wonderland:
Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems

http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=62

https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Project Wonderland relies on the following open source projects for key technologies.

Project Darkstar - provides the scalable, persistant server software infrastructure

jVoiceBridge - provides realtime immersive stereo audio with distance attenuation

Java 3D - provides the scene graph on which the 3D world and scene manager is built

Project Looking Glass - provides the 3D scene manager

https://sgs.dev.java.net/

https://jvoicebridge.dev.java.net/

https://java3d.dev.java.net/

https://lg3d.dev.java.net/

I'm currently working on a project embedding Python into a Java app via Jython. Using Netbeans with the nbpython plugin has worked pretty well. The only problem is the occasional exception thrown from NB, and having to use the absolute latest NB build for compatibility. With the recent spurt of development centered around Jython, Django, and the nbpython plugin, I wouldn't be surprised if even the minor bugs had been cleared up.

I will also say that Jython plus the Netbeans Swing form editor is the best thing to happen to Java ever. It makes dynamic GUI's a hell of a lot easier. Java scripting just rocks.

Some people here will tell you to start dropping managerisms (like those in this message's title) and talk costs. They are correct, if you want to move into management. If you want to stay a programmer, however, just fix the damn problem. Nothing you described is too terribly difficult to correct on your own. Install and use Hudson. It has plug-ins for .net and java language support (and probably more). Make sure you really use its code quality plug-ins (things like fxCop, findBugs, and PMD). In short, do al little every project to improve the development environment. These are free tools and fairly trivial to set up. Getting your environment right is part of your job as a developer. Don't abdicate that responsibility to management, especially if management doesn't understand what your development environment needs.

It is a fact of life that most non-software companies have not yet woken up to the emerging criticality of their software divisions. What you describe isn't surprising or unusual. Be better than 70% of your peers by fixing the problems as you see them. You will learn to be a better developer and management will learn to appreciate your efficiency. If they don't, so what? Move on with all the knowledge you gained building up their development infrastructure.

let a web page have a Java component (for example) that doesn't run in a little box... but instead runs in the background and updates the page

I've never tried it, but there's "com.sun.java.browser.dom", which is supposed to let your applet access the browser's Document Object Model. In keeping with the applet security model, there are limits on what can be done to the DOM; I think access is read-only, although the documentation isn't clear.

In typical Sun fashion, rather than having a basic API that works, this is tied in with "Project Metro" and "GlassFish", and is supposed to work with a Java applications server, so Sun can make some money on the server side. Try these JMaki examples, which correspond to simple AJAX applications but are implemented in Java.

Java itself would be a good alternative to JavaScript. At least it scales up better. But Sun insists on burying the language under a mountain of mediocre and ever-changing libraries.

Up until recently I'd had a similar opinion. Then I started work on a new project and began noticing all these interesting technologies.

Some exciting technology is being developed using Java. Check the trove.

Someone port java to opengl.

Seriously. That would rock.

You can use OpenGL from Java with JOGL. Or were you thinking of running a Java or J2EE stack on your GPU? (That would be a really bad idea, in case there were any doubts)

When I go to the download page there is no source code and no GPL.

https://lwuit.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectProcess?tab=1

Jython is a scripting language in java (see the Java scripting project). As per the specification for Java scripting languages, you can run Java code just like code written in the scripting language (jython, in this case)

Alternately, try Flying Saucer:
https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/
Well-formed XHTML + CSS 2.1 + Flying Saucer = PDF

After compiling a JBoss server, Ant, and getting JBoss studio (read: a day later), I decided to jump right in.

Here's a hint for you: Use Glassfish. Your life will be about 1000x easier.

Here's another hint: No matter what anyone tells you, AVOID JAVA SERVER FACES LIKE THE PLAGUE. The API will not help you.

Hope that helps. :-)

WTF? My team uses Fortify to analyze our Java webapps (compiled on the Sun JDK and running on their JRE), which is then deployed to Linux servers running RHEL 5. HTTP connectivity for the apps is provided by Jetty; the apps themselves connect to Oracle databases (using C3P0 for connection pooling).

With Fortify 4.0, I griped that it provided no value that we didn't already get with FindBugs (for free). The 5.0 release (along with the workbench, which provides better information than the HTML report), however, did catch a few bugs which weren't caught by FindBugs. We now run both tools in our automated Hudson builds.

Where, exactly, are the Microsoft products in the above list?

It's been in early development, and many people view it as a futile waste of time. It's not inaccessible though, you can download it here: https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/binary-builds.html There are also links to extensive documentation on that page.

you forgot Java 3D

Game programming I'd think would be doable, if they have good DirectX libraries and an SDK that works well.

Java has some pretty good libraries for game development.

• A fully featured OpenGL API: JOGL
• OpenAL for audio: JOAL
• JInput for game controllers and other input: JInput
• Java version of SDL for a complete game dev tool: SDLJava

Also, check out the pure Java implementation of the Quake 2 engine. Runs on every major platform with near native speed. Jake2

I doubt that Java will ever be used for mainstream games, but for small projects it is a great tool that will allow a game to run on any platform with AAA title graphics and sound.

Game programming I'd think would be doable, if they have good DirectX libraries and an SDK that works well.

Java has some pretty good libraries for game development.

• A fully featured OpenGL API: JOGL
• OpenAL for audio: JOAL
• JInput for game controllers and other input: JInput
• Java version of SDL for a complete game dev tool: SDLJava

Also, check out the pure Java implementation of the Quake 2 engine. Runs on every major platform with near native speed. Jake2

I doubt that Java will ever be used for mainstream games, but for small projects it is a great tool that will allow a game to run on any platform with AAA title graphics and sound.

Game programming I'd think would be doable, if they have good DirectX libraries and an SDK that works well.

Java has some pretty good libraries for game development.

• A fully featured OpenGL API: JOGL
• OpenAL for audio: JOAL
• JInput for game controllers and other input: JInput
• Java version of SDL for a complete game dev tool: SDLJava

Also, check out the pure Java implementation of the Quake 2 engine. Runs on every major platform with near native speed. Jake2

I doubt that Java will ever be used for mainstream games, but for small projects it is a great tool that will allow a game to run on any platform with AAA title graphics and sound.

there are volunteers who have been working on this for some time here
which is what JDK 7 .0 is based on!

there are volunteers who have been working on this for some time here
which is what JDK 7 .0 is based on!