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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
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
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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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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.
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".
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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...
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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!