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I can't blame a language or runtime for piss poor design

You can blame the choice of a language ill suited to the task.

Java may not be the best choice for a real time environment, for one thing there's the garbage collection to consider. A language that stops from time to time to perform some internal task isn't what I would choose for a time-critical system where human lives may be in danger.

or not:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/virtualization/whatsnew/index.html
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/db-virtualization-support-133757.pdf

or not:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/virtualization/whatsnew/index.html
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/db-virtualization-support-133757.pdf

And by the way, why target commercial software only? Open source is just as susceptible to bloat. Take OpenOffice and its derivative for example

I didn't say proprietary; I said commercial, and I meant it in the sense of any computer program that is distributed to the public for a fee, or for which the maintainer offers a paid support service. For example, Oracle Open Office (formerly StarOffice) is a commercial distribution of OpenOffice.org.

Why would I want to do that in Java? I'd just use a TreeSet and have the objects implement the Comparable interface.

C/C++ is faster than Java but having to re-invent the wheel all the time is what makes me prefer Java. Another good example is loading a configuration file. In Java I just create Properties object with a file path and I've got access to a configuration file. In C++ you have to mess about with streams, write your own string parser and then create a map to store everything.

Why would I want to do that in Java? I'd just use a TreeSet and have the objects implement the Comparable interface.

C/C++ is faster than Java but having to re-invent the wheel all the time is what makes me prefer Java. Another good example is loading a configuration file. In Java I just create Properties object with a file path and I've got access to a configuration file. In C++ you have to mess about with streams, write your own string parser and then create a map to store everything.

Oracle trashed a lot of former Sun technologies â" not the least of which is Sun's open source identity platform which included OpenSSO and OpenDS.

Uh.. I don't get it. Oracle still sells these, the DS anyway, maybe Sun's SSO was tossed, but Oracle had their own identity platform too. It's surprising enough that Sun's DS is still available and prominently listed.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/overview/index-085178.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen

And, the corresponding open source projects are still here http://www.opends.org/ and here http://java.net/projects/opensso

Is this a silly way to say Oracle is not commercializing Sun's open source versions of the projects Oracle _owns_ and is selling? Isn't that kind of good for open source? I would think more distance between Oracle and OpenDS/OpenSSO would be a GOOD thing for the health of the open source projects?

Oh.. this is a slashvertisement, shit, and I fell for it.

Actually there is a standard way to provide validation and even auto-completion of annotation values with Annotation Processors, though I don't think google provides one.

Anyway, It is much more convenient to write conditions in assert().

Funny thing is that since 2002 (Java 1.4) the assertion mechanism is a standard language feature - and intended for Design by Contract

And so the reinvented wheels of redundancy keep on turning and repeating themselves over and over again, but at least we can now assert that they were turning, will be turning and didn't stop turning in several ways...

And how is an application supposed to check user input? The normal way to check a user-provided floating-point value for validity is to call Double.parseDouble() and catch the NumberFormatException that's thrown if it can't be parsed, then apply any relevant range checks using mathematical operations. The documentation for that method doesn't say anything about entering an infinite loop; it can either return a double, or throw an exception.

An alternative would be to use regular expressions. There might be some apps that are using "double" for large integers, or fixed-point quantities; but the regular expression for a general floating-point number is already pretty hairy. Can you give a regular expression that filters out the strings, and only the strings, that lead to this bug?

Oracle has posted a fix for the bug, in the form of a patch. Official releases will be available next week. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/fpupdater-tool-readme-305936.html http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2011/02/security_alert_for_cve-2010-44.html

Oracle has posted a fix for the bug, in the form of a patch. Official releases will be available next week. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/fpupdater-tool-readme-305936.html http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2011/02/security_alert_for_cve-2010-44.html

Actually, it's already fixed: Oracle has released a fix for this issue through Security Alert CVE-2010-4476. For more information see: http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2011/02/security_alert_for_cve-2010-44.html

Basically how can execution of a thread be stopped [...]?

The short answer is that a thread can never be both arbitrarily and safely stopped. That's why Thread.stop() has been deprecated since nearly its introduction in Java. There's an official summary of the reasons, linked from the API. Essentially any forcible stoppage of a thread could silently compromise the thread-safety of the entire application.

How do you even time out Executor threads after a fixed amount of time?

If your worker threads happen to by blocked on IO or something similar, or they are waiting for a synchronization monitor, then you can indeed interrupt them. However, that doesn't seem to be the case in your situation; you seem to be saying that these threads aren't waiting, they're just merrily running along, doing productive work. You want them to be arbitrarily halted after some time or some event, but that's just not possible.

In those cases, your threads are supposed to police themselves, usually by polling some external signal (set by another thread) indicating that they should give up. Since threads can't kill other threads safely, the very mechanism has been deprecated. By the way, this has nothing to do with the (relatively new) Executor threads, nor with any particular version of Tomcat.

I expect the gap to close over time

Me too, but it'll take a LONG time...

Java SE embedded vs Android 2.2.
Perhaps if Larry wins the court case against Android, Google will be forced to license Java and Android will finally get some decent performance by using Hotspot instead of Dalvik! :)
In any case, these dual core ARM machines are more than powerful enough to run the desktop version for light applications.

According to the RIAA:

Digital revenues have grown from nearly $200 million in '04 to $2.3 billion in '07 (estimates for '08 - $3 billion), accounting for 25 percent of all retail value revenue (upwards of 30 percent at end of '08).

That gives us a 2008 estimate of 12 billion dollars in revenue for retail sale of music. Presumably for the RIAA, who "create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States". So a total of about $14.2 billion in revenue.

Now, obviously we also need to take the MPAA into consideration. Again, using 2008 numbers:
Ticket sales grossed about $10 billion. And since quite a lot of people seem to claim (and no, I have no source handy) that home video sales is about the same as ticket sales, then we're looking at around $20 billion in 2008.

Apple's revenue for 2008 in the Americas was $14.5 billion. Granted, that's a larger geographical area than RIAA's numbers, but then again Apple is a relatively small company in the IT landscape.

How about some of the bigger fish?

IBM reported revenue of $103.6 billion, and pre-tax profit of $16.7 billion.

So, the movie and music industry combined gets up to around $35 billion in 2008 in the US.

IBM (world wide) - $103 billion
Apple (Americas) - $14.5 billion
Google (world wide) - $21.8 billion
Microsoft (world wide?) - $60.4 billion
Oracle (world wide?) - 22.4 billion
Dell (world wide?) - 61 billion

Seriously - why the fuck are the IT giants just turning their back on the complete and utter gang rape on things like the Internet, when most of their products would die off the moment it stops working the way it should.

Just buy out the fuckers, boot the executives, lawyers, assistants etc. from their penthouse offices (literally boot them out over the balcony) and just kill off these massively debilitating parasites.

Oracle's RDBMS (or what category they might file their flagship product in today) has never been the nicest nor the most utter terrible database system - like most tools, albeit being a complex tool, it needs to fit the application. However, Oracle the company is generally more infamous for it's cocky multi-bazillion-yacht Larry "marketing" and "business strategies" than for a multitude of jaw-dropping innovations.

If you stumble across their press release regarding MySQL 5.5, I find the sub-headline pretty revealing in that context:

"New Performance and Scalability Enhancements Highlight Oracle’s Continued Investment in MySQL"

So it's all about getting the Great Involvement of Oracle in MySQL getting hammered into the minds of the general open-source-MySQL-lover-or-user public, so that we/they value Oracle for their commitment - it't not really about shelling out a better product, the Enhancements are just a tool in their real business: making people believe. And if they have to stress their "Investment" so dramatically, I wonder how deep that involvement really goes.

I am not surprised.

In the sense of the price is being brought in line with Oracle's traditional products (MySQL starts at $2000 a server now).

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:PROD_HIER_ID:58095029061520477171389

Fortunately, you don't have to use the flash-based support site. If you go to http://supporthtml.oracle.com/ , you get the HTML-based version, which is much more user friendly.

https://supporthtml.oracle.com/

Good news for you:

https://supporthtml.oracle.com/

no joke. Under-advertised, but actually works.

Ohh bullshit!

Oracle's licenses are straight up and clear. You either buy per named user or per CPU. If you buy per CPU you can have as many users as you want connected to that machine. Need more Horsepower then you license another CPU.

If you just want to teach yourself Oracle, if you just want to set a system up for a client to do a proof of concept, hell if you want to just TAKE their software with no support, you can download everything they have for FREE all you have to do is sign up.

Oracle Standard Edition One is 180.00 per named user. Annual Support is 39.00

Oracle Standard Edition One is 5800.00 per CPU ( as many users as the machine can handle ) annual support is 1276.00.

There is nothing hidden it is perfectly straight forward. You pay for the product then you pay ( or not ) annual support

If you are at a place in a business when you need the power of Oracle then you know what the cost is really insignificant. If you don't need that kind of horsepower then there are plenty of other options, PostGres, MySQL, MS-SQL, DB2 etc. etc..

Oracle support is 2nd to none and yes it is not free ( what a surprise ) but when it comes down to it, the support is world wide, 24/7/365 and when you pick up the phone you get an actual engineer not some script reader.

You can piss and moan and say whatever you want about LE but when you need massive scalability, rock solid stability and support that is there, when you call for it, nothing beats Oracle.

If you wish to contribute to OpenJDK, you'll need to execute http://oss.oracle.com/oca.pdf.

Trying not to be contrary, but if you really want to contribute, load it into GIT; create a project on GitHub and fork it. Take the bits from Harmony needed to fill in the gaps. That's a much more valuable "contribution" than giving things to Oracle.

Also, this isn't "my" Java; I really don't much like the stuff; don't program in it and strongly recommend that anybody that does have to deal with it ports to GCJ rather than using it in a JVM.

So, back on the original topic, this discussion doesn't have much to do with criticising the freedom of GPL software. The OpenJDK binary clearly isn't GPL. Nobody should use it if they can avoid it and if they have no choice they should be thinking about how they can migrate off as quick as possible.

If you wish to contribute to OpenJDK, you'll need to execute http://oss.oracle.com/oca.pdf... giving Oracle the right to relicense your code as they see fit.

Since anything not derived (apply Oracle's opinion of "derived") from OpenJDK has no free TCK license, and any TCK you pass causes you to add more restrictions than the GPL license permits... therein lies your trap. Your "Free" Java, isn't.

.......yet lacks such newfangled things as OpenGL support

Say what? OpenGL has been supported since Java 5, which is itself over 4 years old.

I don't think the author had any understanding of the history of SPARC or Oracle (Sun)'s product linup. Here is an informative interview from the useful Sun hardware oriented blog on the subject http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/ http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/innovation/innovator-hetherington-191304.html

The internet isn't really a place to gain an informed opinion over things.

Yes, you are correct. Opinions should all be tossed out. Pure info is what the Internet is all about. Pick a language and a FOSS project, develop away, it's a great learning process that I've found much more "educational" than formal education.

Teach yourself C++: C++ Annotations, C++ Language Tutorial... ... or Perl: Perl programming documentation, or JavaScript,
or Java.

Just search the web, you'll find everything that any professor will ever be able to teach you online. Need guidance, clarification, or to ask a question? There are free online forums for that too... Yes, the Internet on average, much like the FM band, has more signal than noise, but similarly you can easily tune your into the signal you need.

Consider this: My Java "professor" gave an assignment where we read in rows of data from standard input, and output the table sorted by a certain column's value. He offered extra credit for proper alignment and justification of the table's cells... "WTF? Really?", I thought.

I used the Collections framework along with Swing to provide a GUI w/ sortable & justified JTable columns instead of doing character counting and sending extra spaces with the text to the standard output. He gave me a C. Another student used the Formatter to provide printf style formatting... also got a C, WTF! Go beyond the prof's teachings & expectations to meet a requirement, get a poor grade... That's dumb and counter productive.

In the real world, you try not to re-invent the wheel, this college course was not teaching practical programming; It was so far beneath what I learned already online, on Java's own website, I dropped the course (waste of time). Sure I can write a merge sort, or programatically align console text output, but that was not what the assignment said: "Provide a tabular output sorted by the 'Name' column." We learned merge sort 2 weeks prior, but the "professor" would not move on.

Not having a "degree" myself, I frequently answer questions that "Degree" holding graduates ask in online forums... Why? Because they didn't learn what they needed to know in their courses.

You would be hard pressed to find a programmer that doesn't have some form of documentation open in another window, screen, or context menu while coding. IMO, besides learning about algorithms and complexity, the language specs & online tutorials are all you really need. I find paper books pale in comparison to down-loadable, copy&paste-able free, online resources. Also note: As a programmer you will be expected to keep up to date with the ever changing languages you learn. All of these changes are easily accessible online too.

There's a lot of noise and very little quality signal to use and without having a degree to start with it's pretty much futile in terms of knowing what is and is not reliable information.

I call bullshit. See esp. the Java link above, your arguments are ill-informed, and reek of FUD. Search google for "java tutorial", or "$any_lang tutorial" and you get some pretty damn reliable, pure "signal" information about what you searched for.

Are you really arguing that Language specs & Tutorials from IBM, Microsoft, etc, and docs from a language's main website (such as http://perldoc.perl.org/

The internet isn't really a place to gain an informed opinion over things.

Yes, you are correct. Opinions should all be tossed out. Pure info is what the Internet is all about. Pick a language and a FOSS project, develop away, it's a great learning process that I've found much more "educational" than formal education.

Teach yourself C++: C++ Annotations, C++ Language Tutorial... ... or Perl: Perl programming documentation, or JavaScript,
or Java.

Just search the web, you'll find everything that any professor will ever be able to teach you online. Need guidance, clarification, or to ask a question? There are free online forums for that too... Yes, the Internet on average, much like the FM band, has more signal than noise, but similarly you can easily tune your into the signal you need.

Consider this: My Java "professor" gave an assignment where we read in rows of data from standard input, and output the table sorted by a certain column's value. He offered extra credit for proper alignment and justification of the table's cells... "WTF? Really?", I thought.

I used the Collections framework along with Swing to provide a GUI w/ sortable & justified JTable columns instead of doing character counting and sending extra spaces with the text to the standard output. He gave me a C. Another student used the Formatter to provide printf style formatting... also got a C, WTF! Go beyond the prof's teachings & expectations to meet a requirement, get a poor grade... That's dumb and counter productive.

In the real world, you try not to re-invent the wheel, this college course was not teaching practical programming; It was so far beneath what I learned already online, on Java's own website, I dropped the course (waste of time). Sure I can write a merge sort, or programatically align console text output, but that was not what the assignment said: "Provide a tabular output sorted by the 'Name' column." We learned merge sort 2 weeks prior, but the "professor" would not move on.

Not having a "degree" myself, I frequently answer questions that "Degree" holding graduates ask in online forums... Why? Because they didn't learn what they needed to know in their courses.

You would be hard pressed to find a programmer that doesn't have some form of documentation open in another window, screen, or context menu while coding. IMO, besides learning about algorithms and complexity, the language specs & online tutorials are all you really need. I find paper books pale in comparison to down-loadable, copy&paste-able free, online resources. Also note: As a programmer you will be expected to keep up to date with the ever changing languages you learn. All of these changes are easily accessible online too.

There's a lot of noise and very little quality signal to use and without having a degree to start with it's pretty much futile in terms of knowing what is and is not reliable information.

I call bullshit. See esp. the Java link above, your arguments are ill-informed, and reek of FUD. Search google for "java tutorial", or "$any_lang tutorial" and you get some pretty damn reliable, pure "signal" information about what you searched for.

Are you really arguing that Language specs & Tutorials from IBM, Microsoft, etc, and docs from a language's main website (such as http://perldoc.perl.org/

You can download almost all of Oracle's software right from their website for personal or educational use. You are expected to have a license though if you use it to conduct any business transactions. I believe that they also have a 'lite' edition of their database in case you wanted to also try that out. From their website:

Software Downloads

Developers:

All software downloads are free, and most come with a Developer License that allows you to use full versions of the products at no charge while developing and prototyping your applications, or for strictly self-educational purposes. You can buy products with full-use licenses at any time from the online Store or from your sales representative.

Customers:

If you already have a commercial license you should download your software from our E-Delivery site, which is specifically designed for customer fulfillment. For patches, see My Oracle Support.

Java UIs appear slow not so much because of their speed, but because of their responsiveness, which may be hindered by the pauses induced by garbage collection. Work is being done to address that. They also require more memory than native UIs.

Swing's API is just horrible.

Swing's API is not bad. It allows you to create a working mirrored, 35-rotated radio button with three lines of code. It's true that built-in layout managers suck, but BoxLayout is almost usable. And if you don't like them, then don't use them at all, and fall back to absolute positioning, which is what most other toolkits do anyway. Moreover, the original poster didn't require a widget toolkit, but rather a 2D graphics API.

For example, why the hell does java.awt.Graphics.drawRectangle() not accept a java.awt.Rectangle as a parameter?

Graphics.drawRectangle() does not exist. Are you talking about Graphics.drawRect()? It's a legacy API from Java 1.0 which was intended to run on machines where the overhead of converting coordinates into a heap-allocated Rectangle structure could be significant.
Instead you should use Graphics2D.draw(), which consistently supports any Shape, including a Rectangle. It also supports floating point coodinates, transforms, etc. Please update your trolling to 2005, thank you.

I do still agree that Java is one of the better choices for cross-platform GUI building, by virtue of not being overcomplicated and error-prone like C++ or unbearably slow like Python; but if this is the best we can do, I weep for the future of the human race.

Instead, in my opinion Java2D is the most elegant, intuitive and powerful 2D "canvas" API I've ever used. For example, it allows you, with a few lines of code, to load an OpenType font, format a string using it, and convert it to a Shape which can be rendered using the current stroke and fill properties. Any step of the process can be customized using the same API: you can break the string in lines using a layout, you can iterate the vertices of the resulting Shape, you can apply transforms and clipping, the usual Porter-Duff composition, and you can control the rasterization from Shapes into pixels. All of this implemented mostly in pure Java, with fully commented source code available, and it's available out of the box in all Java implementations.

Tutorial.

Looks like Java Swing is still popular. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/422956/java-swing-or-java-qt Now we have JavaFX for many more special graphical effects: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index-jsp-139879.html http://javafx.com/

Enterprise Architect is very nice, since you can do forward and reverse software engineering with it.

However, if you do not have the budget allocated for it, a good compromise is StarUML,
which became very nice and usable lately and has the same "feeling" and menu-driven approach
like the old Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect:

http://staruml.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/staruml/files/staruml/5.0/staruml-5.0-with-cm.exe/download

As for Rational Rose, the first original version was very good with some known quirks until it
became IBM Rational Rose and was converted into a "super Eclipse" plug-in.

So, if you enjoyed drawing UML diagrams in the old Rational Rose,
then Enterprise Architect and StarUML are the tools that you are looking for.

And if you do not like to draw with a mouse then Graphviz Dot and a good text editor is for you:
http://www.graphviz.org/Download.php

For tracking issues / documents and schedule,
I can recommend either BugZilla, Mantis or BaseCamp:

http://www.bugzilla.org/download/

http://www.mantisbt.org/

http://basecamphq.com/

As for the actual writing part, your company should already have a good set of Word Templates,
to document the actual Sofware Requirement and Specification (SRS), Sofware Design Document (SDD),
Change Request Document (CRD).

Once, you got those set up, then we mostly use MantisBT or BaseCamp to share, comment and track them.

As for producing code documentation, the choice are: Doxygen, JavaDoc, NDoc, JsDoc:

http://www.doxygen.org/

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-jsp-135444.html

http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/

Given that this article is about ZFS, and this thread was originally about ZFS filesystem compression, I assumed that the mention of NTFS was incidental.

As I don't have access to the source code for SQL Server or Oracle, I find it difficult to comment on its internals. By default I would expect Windows to keep the data it writes in the page cache and perform read ahead caching, like it does for all the other IO, ever since MS SmartDrive for DOS. I would also have suspected that the DBMSs you mentioned kept some kind of cache for themselves, but I will defer to you on this as well.

You may want to get hold of the Oracle people, because they are also misinformed.

Regarding your claim of doubling the IO, I suggest you read my post again. You did not actually account for, consider, or address any point I made. You just repeated yourself. That's not how a discussion works. As an example, I will now address your point:

In the most trivial cases, raw data blocks being written into already allocated space in file, you would be almost correct: only the bytes being written would have to be sent to the drive. That case does not apply to any database I have worked with (except maybe MS Access or SQLite, I am not sure). Any real world database has behaviour that is far more sophisticated than that, as I explained in my previous comment. Even in your hypothetical trivial database that directly modifies the data in place, an 'unnecessary' read is unlikely: Conceptually, an INSERT would likely be placed at the end of the file, where all the other recent inserts would have been, thus the data is likely to have been cached. An UPDATE would almost certainly have had to read the rows anyway to determine their eligibility for the update, so the read would also have been necessary.

As for why the feature was not included in the database software in the past, remember that the 'cheapness' of this transparent compression is a result of the uneven evolution of storage devices and processors. Processors have become more powerful a lot faster than the decrease in storage access performance (the explosion of multi-core chips helped a lot, too). We are now able to trade processing power we didn't have before to get increased IO performance.

That notwithstanding, your assumption was also wrong. Databases have had compression for a long time. For example, IBM's DB2 has had support for tablespace-level compression since at least 1993.

In fact, now that I think about it, your even more basic assumption is wrong: What's the most widely-used database in office environments? Here's a hint: It's made by Microsoft, and it's not SQL Server. Or Access.

Answer: NTFS (or possibly FAT, all those USB sticks and SD cards...)

A filesystem *IS* a (buzzword alert) no-sql database. To talk about filesystem compression as separate from database compression is misleading. Personal filesystem compression has been around since at least 1990. Didn't you use Stacker in DOS? With it you could see big benefits in system performance for exactly the same reasons as have been outlined in this topic; the difference there was since there was so much less processing power available, that would quickly become the application bottleneck. That is not true for modern database server.

The documentation is still there. And as for me, I like the documentation of .Net much more than Java's. For example have a look at the documentation of .Net's List<T>.Add() method, that includes detailed explanation of the method, its time complexity, example usage and links to the same method in other versions of .Net. Compare that to the documentation of ArrayList<E>.add(), which is little more than one line.

Hell you can't even run Solaris on someone elses hardware and BUY! support.

False now:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/non-sun-x86-081976.html

The story says that it is "not allowed to be used in production". That is not correct. Instead, it works like this (from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/faqs-oraclesolaris11express-185609.pdf):

* If you want to use it in production, you need to purchase support (for example "Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for non-Oracle hardware")
* If you don't buy the support contract, you can use it for evaluation and development

Pay for production use, free for other use.

I can't speak for the other products but yes, this new release is fully supported by Oracle. You can find details on the support offerings that cover both Sun/Oracle hardware and third-party hardware here. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html

A mere $1000,- per Socket.

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:2847258479365119::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:27242443094470222098916,14755487300180585563861

Holy smokes I guess Oracle is really not interested in the SMB market after all. Well I for one will do the only thing I can and that is vote with my dollars. Perhaps Its time to look at moving away from Solaris (RIP) and look at the alternatives Linux/FreeBSD

A mere $1000,- per Socket.

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:2847258479365119::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:27242443094470222098916,14755487300180585563861

Drop in the bucket for your average corporation.

A mere $1000,- per Socket.

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:2847258479365119::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:27242443094470222098916,14755487300180585563861

Not anymore, they finally created this:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/non-sun-x86-081976.html

I wrote a huge reply to this already on Saturday and then junked it because it went too far into minutia.

Ha ha.... the point of targeting Java language version 1.4 is for maximum compatibilty, specially when a library does not use or require any 1.5/1.6 or 1.7 features.

A Collections library not supporting Generics, thus not supporting type safety, is a huge defect. This is just one of the many reasons that Apache Commons Collections is losing ground to Guava (formerly Google Collections).

The other thing is that they could write the code using Generics, then offer 1.4 and 1.5 versions of the library from the same code-base using javac's -target parameter. This is part of the reason that Java's Generics are crappier; Java's were implemented using type erasure so existing classes could be reused.

And you're right, a few of the collections offered in Apache Commons Collections have replacements in the java.util.concurrent package.

Are you saying that Websphere and Weblogic don't have any JSF dependencies?
The last time I looked, there were very significant Apache dependencies in both Weblogic and Websphere.

Lets take a look, specifically at JSF implementations.

Weblogic uses "Sun Microsystems JavaServer Faces Implementation" 1.2-b20-FCS - or 1_2_03-rc2. (Source)

Websphere 7 has the option of two JSF implementations. The default is "Sun Reference Implementation 1.2." The other option is Apache MyFaces 1.2. (Source)

Sounds to me like the reference implementation of JSF 1.2 is the preferred version in these two products!

Even Jetty will have some Apache stuff in its pom.xml, won't it?

Jetty's main configuration file is jetty.xml.

pom.xml is part of an Apache Maven project. Even if you choose to deploy said project to Jetty, that file will not be present in the war/ear file you deploy to Jetty.

Well, I just read the final complaint and it has nothing to do with patents:
http://www.oracle.com/sapsuit/complaint.pdf

"Is Java making me money?"

Yes, it is.

They already have such a thing: Oracle Open Office.

> Maybe that's trying to get rid of free decent Java IDEs and muscle the makers of the rest into paying them a fee.

Well, they were giving away JDeveloper even before they bought Sun.

Now, instead of ditching Netbeans, or making people pay for it, they going to be supporting both IDEs, for free.

JDeveloper and NetBeans - The Official Answers

How about Oracle? Some of their customers might be a little security conscious and may wish to prohibit programs like Flash on their networks. However, using their support requires flash.