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Oracle and Sun Team Up to Provide .NET Alternative
segphault writes "Ars Technica has an article about the new partnership between Sun and Oracle, designed to provide an alternative to .NET." From the article: "According to Ellison and McNealy, their mutual goal is the production of a complete Java-centric enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages Solaris 10 and Oracle's Fusion middleware. Designed specifically as an alternative to Microsoft's .NET technology stack, the new platform is competitively priced and based on robust frameworks."
As is their AIM methodology.
In fact, Oracle Apps downloads are unsigned, untrusted. You have to open the browser (and it must be IE) pretty dern wide to use it.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
"the new platform is competitively priced"
.NET wouldn't go amiss, but what's the point? Sufficient technologies already exist out there to do what they're trumpeting as new...
What!? I remember when Oracle and Sun charging was based on how much money fell out your pockets when they turned you upside down and shook you.
Seriously though, an alternative is nice, but isn't that alternative already here and called Java? I suppose a nice end-to-end branding a-la
/dev/random
"According to Ellison, this is all about providing users and developers with technology based on standards. But what standards is he talking about, and are those the standards that consumers care about? The availability of an open source .NET implementation based on ECMA standards certainly makes Java look more proprietary."
.NET has been proposed to the ECMA, which is not even a standard organization. Mono provides only a small subset of .NET.
The whole JDK1.5 API is public and totaly available to be implemented by anyone (www.jcp.org). Also there is already a 98%-complete implementation of it (www.classpath.org). OTOH, only a small part of
(that said, the most used Java Platform (Sun) is still proprietary)
Million Dollar Screenshot
As a sysadmin, I work with a plethora of applications, systems, integrators and vendors. We run everything: AS400, PHP, J2EE, linux, windows, perl, oracle, db2, postgres, mysql...I could go on, and on. Windows bashing aside, Java is the only technology that's "advanced" enough to break itself. I can literally run some of my perl scripts over and over until the cows come home...or leave my cisco routers up for 700 days...or reboot linux til I'm blue in the face and it's always predictable. When they fail, there's some reason: Disk space, upgraded software, user error, low memory, gamma rays, etc. Java is not that way - java has a mind of its own doesn't need an excuse to not work 1/1000 times.
My point here is that I feel for the people who will be administering this system - all of those sleepless nights troubleshooting transient failures with no fixes or even causes. Oh well, they made their bed, I suppose.
...is the sincerest form of flattery.
Rather than teaming with Larry Elliscum, a better move for Sun would be to open Java up to the ECMA/ISO for standardization.
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i for one am sick of dealing with classpaths and 250 jars inside of jar files inside of war files inside of ear files - catch my drift.
.net has, and something like a GAC.
.net after 6 years of dealing with Sun's bullcrap and i have never looked back.
i'm also sick of J2EE containers with class loaders schemes that are more complicated than my senior year algebraic structures course.
build a linker into java just like
than allow versioning of libraries.
then get rid of checked exceptions so i don't have to do try/catch/wrap/rethrows(or do nothing) in 90% of my J2EE code.
then get rid of stateful, local session beans - how redudant is that???
then find a way to get rid of the 14 million defines i need in my server.xml to specify which implementation of each 'open, standard' interface i need
so, java as a language - it's ok
java as a platform - SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
left java for
Y'know, I was just saying to myself, "Self," I said to myself, "you really need an enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages middleware based on robust frameworks." Wow, they must have been reading my mind!
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So now Sun is taking on .NET and they're teaming up with Oracle for it ? What a load of nonsense. According to Sun themselves the whole partnership is almost entirely based on Oracle choosing Solaris 10 as their preferred platform. You can read more about that here.
.NET, and if you take the effort to skim the Sun news articles I'm sure you'd conclude the same. What about this: Linux with either MySQL or Postgres vs. Solaris 10 with Oracle, or MySQL/Postgres if you so prefer. And all based on almost the same price / options.
IMO some "reporters" only read what they want to read. Sun already has Java and it has got quite a big foothold to last. Solaris 10 is also kicking some serious ass. Why on earth would they want to directly confront a company like MS when they can easily expand their own market and slowly strengthen their position ? IMVHO the big competitor for Sun is Linux at this time. Something clearly displayed when looking at Novell which almost immediatly started "OpenSuSE" after the release of OpenSolaris. Coincedence? I wonder...
This step has IMO nothing to do with
Utopia? Then why is Oracle also jumping on the "opening up some products" bandwagon ?
No, I don't think MS has much to worry, Sun is targeting another audience here.
Why exactly would that help? Right now the Java standards are open to input from a wide range of voices, from individual developers through open source communities like Apache to corporations like Oracle and IBM. No voice has overall control, no-one can force through self-serving capabilities and everyone gets to use the specifications royalty free. All of them know their contributions can be implemented as open source yet that the market in which they operate can't be monopolised by any single company.
Sun started ECMA standardisation and then realised half-way through the process that it was going to produce the worst of all worlds; a rubber-stamp for the work Sun had done, with no input from any communities and a freezing of the specs by the ECMA dinosaur, combined with a loss of the ability to enforce the Java trademark and an inevitable embrace-and-extend by companies like Microsoft and IBM. Sun should have worked this out before starting with ECMA but fortunately realised in time and pulled out of the process. The result was the creation of the JCP and the most open, competitive software market the computer industry has yet seen.
Microsoft fully understands the PR value of ECMA and is cynically using it to rubber stamp it's Office 12 XML format to undermine the openness of OpenDocument. That action has done us the good service of showing us just how intellectually bankrupt ECMA actually is. What the Java platform needs is not the destruction ECMA would bring, but rather the further evolution of the JCP, which is working better than pretty much any standards body before it and is only hampered by the public perception of Sun control.
I'd say Sun won the battle, but lost the war. Taking MS to task for making a Windows-optimized version of Java resulted in a big payday for Sun, but killed Java's chances on the Windows desktop.
I'm in the same boat. I look after everything under the sun. Everything from shitty little 2 server ASP websites to 20 server clusters with TB's of backend disk.
I have java servlets used by over 2000 people 24x7. When was the last time I had to restart the JVM? Dec 2002. I also have 8 java (jsp) web applications used by 200,000 ISP customers 24x7. JVM uptimes range from 2 years to several months. On the flipside, i have applications that need to be restarted every week.
The difference? The developers.