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Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support
narramissic writes "Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, said in an April 11 blog post that Google committed a major transgression by only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform. 'Whether you agree with Sun policing it or not, Java compatibility has served us all very well for over a decade,' Phipps wrote. 'That includes being sure as a developer that all core classes are present on all platforms. Creating subsets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden for a really good reason, and it's wanton and irresponsible to casually flaunt the rules.' Phipps characterized his remarks as non-official, saying: 'This isn't something I could comment on on Sun's behalf. My personal comments come purely from my long association with Java topics.'"
Because the subset that every other cloud provider makes will be different, and then you'll need to refactor to run on other clouds. That extra friction will lead to you finding it hard to move between providers, and that's called "lock-in". What we need is an agreed "Java Web Edition" profile from the JCP. Maybe Google could contribute their work?