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Will Oracle Keep Funding Sun's Pet Java Projects?
gkunene writes "Oracle expects Sun to contribute to its operating profit right away. To make that happen, Oracle may pull funding and staff from projects such as JavaFX, Project Looking Glass, and Project GlassFish."
IMHO, JavaFX has been a solution looking for a problem. Applets aren't coming back (thank God), so stop trying to create an ideal Applet platform. HTML5 is meeting that need well enough, thanks' much. Pulling funding from the JavaFX project would hardly even be noticable.
Project Looking Glass is one of those things I'd hate to see go, but Sun hasn't exactly done much with it. Oracle needs to decide that they'll support it full hog as a core product or just leave the project to the OSS community. This noncommittal attitude has been leaving the project in limbo.
Now Project Glassfish, that's a whole other ball of wax. Oracle screwed up Orion (the BEST J2EE server back in the day) to insane levels of uselessness under the guise of Oracle Application Server. (Hey look! Oracle is almost as good at naming as Sun!) Glassfish (aka Sun Java System Application Server) is modern, scalable, easy to use, and absolutely wicked when deployed. Oracle would do well to give up on OAS and just let Sun keep doing what they're doing with SJSAS/GlassFish.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
One would hope that if the Open Source projects like Project Looking Glass, are worthwhile... they will be picked up by people who are using them. If they can open-source others rather than just killing them at least some can stay alive without showing up on the bottom line.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript is an insufficient platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Why do you think Flash is still so widely used? It's not just video. It's complex charting, graphics, animations, etc.
If you think Flash and Silverlight are just going to go away, or that IE and its non-standard compliance and lack of SVG are just going to go away, you're dreaming in technicolour. Web standards will eventually hit a wall.
I don't disagree that a lot of functionality (including video) can be implemented by all browsers that implement that new web standards, but it won't enough.
Besides, JavaFX has distinct advantages over Flash and Silverlight. It integrates seamlessly with server-side Java code. It also shares the same APIs with JavaFX Mobile, which allows mobile and RIA apps to share the same code.
Besides, do you really want the rich web to turn into a battle between two proprietary frameworks? Parts of JavaFX are already open source, and Sun is planning to open source the rest.
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Pulling funding from JavaFX would probably be a bad idea since JavaFX is meant to keep Java competitive with .Net and Flash platforms which are rapidly taking over web and application markets. There is a big market in content design so it seems ridiculous to cut funding to those projects and they would shoot themselves in the foot. I see it more likely that MySQl is in danger, since this is heavily overlapped with oracles own database applications.
I'm so happy that Sun managed to release Java under the GPL before it was bought. I can't imagined what would happen if Oracle got a hold of Java without the community being able to fork it if nessecary.
1998 called. It wants its Java cliches back.
Performance issues used to be a big problem with Java. That's long since been solved. The conventional wisdom was that these caused by Java being an "interpreted" language. That hasn't been true for a long time, and even when it was, it was only a minor factor in Java's performance issues.
Aside from the big overhead in firing up the runtime (still a problem, but not an issue for a service application, like Looking Glass) the biggest impact on Java application performance was bad source code compilers. Sun was in such a hurry to get the thing to market that all the early compilers were hastily adapted from C++ compilers, and created code that was inefficient and full of memory leaks — this on a platform that was specifically designed to make memory leaks impossible!
The Oracle acquisition is like a big second chance for Java, and a lot of other Sun technologies. Finally, they're under the control of a management hierarchy that doesn't consistently shoot itself in the foot!
``Intel, IBM and Sun basically duplicate a heck of a lot of work trying to do the same thing: make silicon add faster.''
But the competition between Intel and AMD is what has been driving CPU speeds up.
``Microsoft and the Linux community likewise do the same thing with operating systems.''
Again, there is a lot of progress being made because of competition between the various camps. Good features are being cloned, new features are being added, and performance and security are being improved.
``Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX/GWT: redundant.''
Perhaps. Or maybe we'll see some good come from it yet.
``PHP/Rails/J2EE/.Net: redundant.''
Rails gave a major boost to the web development landscape. Competition from .NET has caused Java to improve massively.
``And it's not just the companies that duplicate efforts. All their users and those who develop for these platforms duplicate efforts as well.''
This is true, and a lot of time and effort has been wasted. On the other hand, one has to wonder if we would really have been better off if that hadn't happened.
The trick is that having multiple projects that cater to the same market allows evolution to occur. Each project can move in its own direction, and the world will vote with its feet and cause the projects that make the best choices to thrive. This functionality can then be incorporated by the competing projects, or not, as they see fit. I do believe we end up with better results this way than if we wanted to always avoid duplication.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.