Slashdot Mirror
The Apache/Sun Relationship Worsens
d6y writes "Over on the O'Reilly weblogs there's an entry on the relationship between Sun's Java Community Process and Apache. Sun have been rubbing people up with wrong way (the problems of licensing open source J2EE containers; stuts v. JavaFaces; log4j v. JDK 1.4 logging....) and I hope this gets sorted out real soon.
See also the original VNUNet article and Apache's position paper."
While it does matter in the aesthetic that Sun is restricting certification of open-source J2EE platforms, fortunately Sun has not taken drastic positions of 'shutting down' JBoss or anything like that. This letter from Marc Fleury seems to clarify the exact issue with JBoss.
This seeming 'rivalry' between Sun & Apache is not as clear-cut; Many of the Jakarta contributors are Sun employees and engineers. (Tomcat/Catalina is used as the 'reference implementation' for the Servlet/JSP specifications.) For more on this, check out the former 'open source guy' at Sun: James Duncan Davidson
here's a thread (J2EE considered harmful) on the jakarta-general list that precipitated the Apache statement.
People who write to and use these platforms get what they deserve, and, presumably, what they want.
One thing I don't understand, but I'm sure that many people in the \. community do:
Is there any point to non-certified but highly compliant implementations? I'm sure the lack of certification would scare away commercial users, but what about others? Are they worth the trouble? Would they even want to use the stuff?
Sun's relationship to the OSS community is extremely difficult. Within Sun there is a lively corporate culture and a will to produce a high quality, performant and comfortable UNIX system. Unfortunately, the very same culture also fosters a special kind of NIH syndrome - what pain it was to get Sun to include current popular OSS tools like Perl, Bash and the like into their standard OS distribution!
From a strategic POV, Sun is being increasingly cannibalized in the low end market by Linux and BSD solutions, and at the same time forced to include stuff for free that is differentiating them from Linux like SDS, Sunscreen, ACLs and similar because Microsoft offers such features in their OS for free as well.
At the same time, Sun is not ready to embrace the OSS movement like, for example, IBM does. They fear that giving away code and ideas that they see as differentiation and advantage in an increasingly difficult market would harm their position and they would like to have some security and control, which the OSS process inherently cannot offer at all.
So basically what we have here is a corporation with a fear to "let go" coming under more and more pressure in a difficult economic situation.
For large organizations who (like mine) made a $50mil investment in moving to J2EE applications as a corporate standard, the Sun stamp of approval is absolutely necessary.
Personally, I'll take Tomcat/Catalina + MySQL + Velocity + PoolMan over most Java app servers, and only feel that J2EE benefits extremely large apps with the need to connect to legacy systems.
If the open source community starts to shun Java because of what Sun is doing, it will leave a huge hole and kill the momentum that has built up over the past 5 years or so.
How many of us Java developers began web-development by downloading Tomcat? How many of us love Struts and Velocity and don't want to lock our skillsets into proprietary solutions from BEA or IBM?
Sun needs to draw then walk a fine line between keeping the major app server purveyors happy while keeping the playing field open for those of us who want to use the technology, but don't have $50K handy for a single CPU license.
Mind the gap...
Sun! Get with the program here. One of your most successful technologies is being directly targeted for destruction by the Evil Empire ... and you're fighting with the open source community? This is a sure-fire way to get yourself killed. You've got to have allies somewhere.
Sun's problem is that they want to be a big monopoly like Microsoft, but they aren't one. It may be totallty obvious to Slashdot readers that the only way to successfully complete with Microsoft is to be allied with the open source community, but some players (Sun, Oracle, and even Apple to some extent) still think they can "win."
The problem with the computer industry is that most of the companies involved act like spoiled children. The only exception is IBM, which is a mature company and acts like one.
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>> 2. They "adopted" the free and entirely non-sun code base for Java Servlets (Jakarta) and claimed it was the "Sun Reference Platform"
Yeah, they never did anything for Tomcat did they? (sarcasm) A few of the developers for Tomcat were Sun employees until recently. Did you bother to check any of your other rants?
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I work for a company that has chosen to deploy J2EE applications using JBoss, and has seen substantial success from doing so. The applications running in JBoss bring in hundred of thousands of dollars for us, and support multi-million-dollar vendor/customer data exchanges.
As for the certification, more and more it comes with too high a cost. The price tag on the other "compliant" packages is way, way out of scope, and returns only minor additional results for us. You must also view certification from Sun's point - how much have they charged other major players for certification? How would those companies react if Sun now certified *for free* an open-source J2EE container given away *for free*. Where, for example , would BEA's pricing put them? Grossly overpriced, perhaps?
Sun is caught in a rough position. If they reverse their position and certify JBoss, they run the risk of alienating current partners. If they don't certify them, open source communities will continue to take jabs at their so-called support for open projects.
In the end, we don't really care. By our analysis, JBoss returns the best ROI of any of the J2EE containers. Certification is just a respectful (and expensive) nod from Sun. It doesn't define the real-world value of a product.
JBoss is *not* ready. The single fact that I had to change my code when going from 2.4.3 to 2.4.4 means that there are new bugs with point releases that I have to work around. Granted, I do a lot of heavy transactional-based work and touch much of the container, but with WebSphere, WebLogic or even Orion, I've never had to "fix" my stuff after they've fixed theirs.
Also, JBoss comes bundled with Catalina, Jetty or Tomcat. That's great. Did you know that, up until 2.4.4, the Catalina release wouldn't allow you to change your root context for web applications? You could fix this by maintaining your own source of JBoss, but, when you're trying to manage your own project, the last thing you want to do is manage your own revision control for the application server. They fixed it in 2.4.4, but
Missing little crap like that makes we worried about the *very* complex transactional nature for the EJB's and the upcoming clustering solution. That stuff is hard! Even BEA, with all its time and money, has had a hard time with its clustering/failover implementations.
JBoss' implementation was written up on onjava.com. Want to know their suggested solution? Write your application to not need clustering and use a Cisco load-balancer. That's because their solution doesn't work.
What about the auto-deployer? Don't try to update your EAR or WAR by overwriting the archive if the file's larger than 4MB. JBoss'll undeploy your aplication and fail to redeploy it.because it doesn't know how to wait until the copy operation is over. There's some settings to help alleviate this problem, but it's not perfect. I don't expect it to be from JBoss...I would from BEA, for example.
So, let's think a bit before handing the crown to JBoss. Is it well docuemented, code-wise? Yes. Is it fast? For the most part. Does it behave as advertised? No. Will Marc Fleury make sure JBoss succeeds through sheer will? Yup. Will he step on toes? Yes, don't get in his way (for better or worse).
The Baron
Why flamebait, when you can throw fresh chum with no nasty hooks in it? :}
"From what I've seen, Java sucks". Does this mean you've never actually programmed in it?
ALL high-level computer languages, even C, are "hand holding". That's the point! I want my language to make my life easier by hiding the gory details, and i will use the highest-level language that can possibly work well for whatever i'm doing. In many cases, that will be Java.
If you want language-bashing, C++ is a horror. Someone please tell them that you can't solve every problem by adding a new keyword. And if you want to bring up yacc (and by extension, LALR parsing), Java is as clean as C. C itself isn't pure here... try this statement: 'if(a) if (b) something(); else something_else();' Legal C, with a shift-reduce conflict. Does the else apply to if(a), or if(b)? You DID read about LALR parsing in detail, didn't you? But that pales in comparison to C++, which simply cannot be parsed without dynamic type information in the parser. See Knuth's one-line crushing criticism of in in DDJ a few years back. But i digress.
Counting books on the shelf for a language is NO measure of its success, because most computer books are crap. The bad ones are dying off. I keep exactly two C books on my shelf - K&R and Plauger. Does this mean C is dying? No, it means those two books are so effective i don't need anything else.
As for VB... it's not a language for programmers who need hand-holding, because it's saddled with that horrible BASIC grammar that will do nothing but get in their way. If you want a language for beginners, check out Python. The worst thing about using it for a student language is that the students will be grossed out the moment they have to learn a bloated monster like C++ or Perl (not knocking Perl, it's my favorite language, but Python is better).
Java reminds me a lot of Unix... it's not perfect by any stretch, but it's so dang good that there is little point in trying to do better. Its utility as a lingua franca outweighs its minor shortcomings. The nicest thing i can say about Java is that i hardly ever come up against limitations of the language itself - if i have a language-level problem in Java, it is usually due to my own ignorance, especially ignorance of its excellent libraries.
Okay, i'll stop now.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Oh, i like pointers. I like high-powered handguns too, but i wouldn't use them to settle ALL my social problems! Pointers are fantastic where precise memory control is required. Precise memory control is NEVER required, except for systems programming. Something like the Linux kernel should absolutely be written in C. Something like the typical business app has no business whatsoever using C. And yes, C is the mother tongue. Any professional programmer that doesn't at least understand it is severely ignorant, even if they never use it.
I wouldn't even say VB is for dabblers. I'd say it's for morons, and the poor victims who are forced to use that wretched excuse for a language. The only decent part at all is the IDE, and there are better ones.
I don't even think much about the language anymore... my programming these days is abstracted away at the problem and architecture level, and the language is just a side point, as it should be. That's why i want my language to get in the way as little as possible. C often gets in the way, due to its crude libraries. I find Java, Python, Perl, SQL, and Unix shell to be my languages of choice.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Every time someone runs apache on Solaris, Sun sees that as another iplanet sale lost.
Then why did Sun package Apache as part of the default install of Solaris 8?
Solaris now ships with Apache, Perl, and Java. Out of the box, it is a pretty potent web-serving OS. And it can be downloaded for free or delivered to your front porch for about $50US (only Free operating systems are more cost-effective; M$ Windows doesn't even come close).
iPlanet is expensive enough that it really doesn't compete with Apache directly. Typically iPlanet is used in "enterprise" environments alongside J2EE and Oracle. When a company can throw a ton of money at a big server and Oracle, iPlanet is just the icing on the cake.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin