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."

Comments

Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[AKAImBatman]

Ever since Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist, Oracle has been buying their way to a monopoly. They give excuses for purchasing competitors (some of which might even be true), but their core aim is to be the big fish in the pond.

Oracle may get some benefit out of BEA's product line or they might trash it. Doesn't matter either way. Oracle eliminated a competitor, bought a market, and is looking to reap the rewards of that maneuver. The tech is secondary.

That being said, the Sun purchase is slightly different. Oracle and Sun have been a strong pairing on the high end of database deployments. Oracle needs Sun and their hardware to survive. It doesn't hurt that owning the business gives Oracle enough tools to hit IBM where it hurts...

(I'll have to visit IBM sometime and see how many bloody stains I can find on the walls. There has got to be some serious head banging going on over there. ;-))

Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[msobkow]

More to the point, Glassfish has been sold with support to a number of companies. Unlike JavaFX (which has virtually no market share), a significant number of paying customers have bought into the Sun Application Server/Glassfish.

In other words, Sun has contractual obligations to continue with Glassfish, and Oracle has inherited those obligations. They can't just drop support.

Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[larry bagina]

a lot of moderators were wondering if pembo13 prefers ajax or java.

Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[rbanffy]

He was merely informing he would take a WebStart client over an AJAX client any day.

Well... I wouldn't.

Now, someone mod me um +5 informative.

Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[Red Flayer]

Ever since Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist, Oracle has been buying their way to a monopoly. They give excuses for purchasing competitors (some of which might even be true), but their core aim is to be the big fish in the pond.

Buying their way to a monopoly is very different from buying their way to being a big fish in a little pond.

Note that buying BEA still makes then only the second-biggest middleware firm (SAP still being larger in that market).

I agree that Oracle wants to be the dominant competitor in each of the markets it competes in, BUT that is not the same as having monopoly position.

Truth be told, aside from the Sun acquisition, most of Oracle's acquisitions in the past few years have been about horizontal growth -- getting Oracle middleware products into markets where they had little presence (finance & banking, insurance, etc). There has not been so much of them buying competitors in markets they already have a big presence in, which is where the monopoly fears should come.

Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle

[fm6]

Applets are still used quite extensively, actually.

Used? Yes. Extensively? No. There are too many competing technology for embedding applications in a web browser, and Java's applet API is the least powerful among them.

And now we have webstart, which is more or less the same candy in a different wrapper.

No it's not. JWS applications don't use the applet API and do not run in a browser window. They're just like non-embedded applications, except that instead of typing "java main class" or executing a JAR file, you execute an XML file that tells your JRE the URLs it needs to download. You might use a web browser to obtain the XML file. But you can also have a local XML file that you can run without firing up a web browser.

Even at Sun, people mostly agree that applets aren't really useful. They're probably be around as long as Java is, but if Oracle has any sense, they'll stay in maintenance mode with no more API development.
 

Looking Glass

[pete-classic]

They're spending money on Looking Glass? I just went to the web site and they're still featuring the five-year-old demo video.

-Peter

Re:Looking Glass

[Unending]

It's worse than you think.
I worked on the project 3 years ago and it was a horrible mess.
They don't have any sort of 3D desktop concept all they have is a 2D desktop with 3D windows.
The underlying 3D system is impossibly complex and non-nonsensical.
Mouse clicks go through so many layers of checks that response time is ridiculous.
They are using Java3D, which is incredibly slow anyway.
To top all this off it doesn't look like they have changed anything in the last three years.
I might have a slightly tainted view and I haven't looked at the code in three years, but I'm still highly unimpressed.

Re:Looking Glass

[fm6]

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!

How much of it is Open Source?

[argent]

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.

Re:Such projects perhaps should die.

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Ahh, but Oracle may decide to turn their offices into an exotic nightclub and force the engineers to work overtime as erotic dancers. You never know what they might do...

Speculation for nerds, stuff that's made up

History

[UseCase]

I remember thinking the same thing when Adobe bought out Macromedia. I think there is hope for some of the larger more useful pet projects but Oracles primary is making there a new acquisition profitable. Anything not strong enough to adequately monetize will probably be Open Sourced or shelf-ed.

So what observations can be made from other companies in our industry that have acquired companies with a strong library of technologies? What has lasted and what has fallen by the wayside historically speaking?

RIA's need more than HTML5/CSS/JavaScript

[javacowboy]

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.

Re:Such projects perhaps should die.

[AliasMarlowe]

...force the engineers to work overtime as erotic dancers...

How to lose staff and alienate customers?
Oracle has a track record of such brilliance.

Java *IS* open source

[javacowboy]

You don't know what you're talking about.

Java is open source. Most of the source code for Java has been released under the GPL.

They started by releasing the JDK 7 code under an open source license. They then backported this code to OpenJDK 6 by removing some of the JDK 7 features and testing it under the JDK 6 TCK (testing kit).

The latest version of OpenJDK 6 is available for installation on Ubuntu and Fedora via their respective package managers.

The only parts of the proprietary Java 6 that are missing from OpenJDK 6 are:

1) SNMP code.
2) Applet/JavaWebStart code (although they're in the process of open sourcing it.
3) Latest bugfixes since JDK 6 Update 7 but these are slowly finding their way to OpenJDK 6.

Please do some basic research before posting your misconceptions as "facts".

Re:Java isn't (really) open source

[LDoggg_]

Wrong. Wrong on every point.

Java isn't really open source, that's why it's a huge pain in the ass under Linux.

It's in the standard repos on most distros now. It's not any different than installing python or perl or any other language/platform.

Yes, Sun released a version of Java under the GPL. It's the "next" version of Java, Java 7 or 1.7 or whatever they're deciding to call it.

They released the 1.6 JVM and libraries that it was legally allowed to.

The current version of Java, the one that everyone uses, is most definitely not open source. It's free, sure, but it's licensed in such a way that Linux distributions can't package it. (Easily - some have worked around it, but the bottom line is that installing Java 6 on Linux involves an interactive process. It can't be automated.)

Everyone should be using 1.6 because 1.7 isn't released yet. 1.6 is GPL and open source.
That "interactive" process was clicking on the EULA before it was open sourced. Not that big of a deal then, but it's not even an issue anymore.

The "open source" version of Java is missing large chunks of Java and is basically not at all ready.

Big chunks? The JVM and libs were almost complete. The small parts that couldn't be released were 3rd library implementations that Sun didn't have rights to release as GPL. The GNU Classpath project filled in the gaps almost from day.

So, Java isn't "really" open source. It's "going to be" at some point in the future - or at least it was. With Oracle in control, who knows.

It is open source. Really.

(Sure, Oracle can't un-open source what was released - but since that isn't enough for a full version of Java anyway, it's not like it really matters.)

No, it does matter. Billions of IT dollars are still being spent on projects using the java platform.
I'm sure Oracle would have rather had Sun's implemenation all to themselves, but then they should have bought Sun a couple of years ago.

Re:It all depends.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, They specifically said that they were going to keep funding mysql already, while specifically saying that they weren't going to comment on the future of open office. So I think that says something.

Unlikely

[Eravnrekaree]

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.

Project Kenai

[multipartmixed]

I just hope they don't go pulling the plug on Project Kenai.

Kenai is Sun's version of SourceForge/GitHub/Google Code. I'm hosting a project there and it works well enough, a few minor tweaks and it will be fantastic. I chose it because they had bugzilla, mercurial, forums with feeds and a rudimentary wiki with syntax I didn't hate. And a low-barrier to entry (I am more than capable of setting all that stuff up myself, but I'd rather spend the time hacking code).

Funny, though, I only just realized why I must have received that "please evangelize Kenai!" message in my inbox this morning...