Oracle To Invest In Sun Hardware, Cut Sun Staff

An anonymous reader writes "There's been much speculation as to what Oracle plans to do with Sun once the all-but-certain acquisition is complete. According to separate reports on InfoWorld, Oracle has disclosed plans to continue investing in Sun's multithreaded UltraSparc T family of processors, which are used in its Niagara servers, and the M series server family, based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu. However, Larry Ellison has reportedly said that once the Sun acquisition is complete, Oracle will hire 2,000 new employees — more people than it expects to cut from the Sun workforce. Oracle will present its plans for Sun to the public Wednesday."

Comments

Re:What about the software?

[PCM2]

No, they didn't say anything about cutting things out of Netbeans. Just that they want to add more stuff.

As far as JDeveloper being the "strategic" platform, it sounds like that has more to do with the efforts Oracle will take to package it as more of a turnkey platform. Kurian mentioned integrating Hudson with JDeveloper, for example. I don't think there will be anything stopping you from using Netbeans as your primary environment if you don't mind setting up some more stuff yourself. JDeveloper is supposed to be the preferred choice for large teams in enterprise environments.

As for Glassfish, that, too, will continue to be developed. As with Netbeans, Oracle wants it to be a solid reference J2EE implementation, while WebLogic will be the "strategic" platform. The distinctions between those two products are wider than between Netbeans and JDeveloper, so I think it speaks for itself. Kurian specifically called out some of the nice features of Glassfish, and said that they plan to continue to support it as a "rapid development and deployment environment."

Re:What about the software?

[PCM2]

Java threads don't necessarily scale to multiple processors. From what I understand, one of the particular areas of optimization is garbage collection. You might be able to write multithreaded Java applications like it's nothing, but if the JVM itself doesn't handle stuff like garbage collection gracefully, you stand to take a big performance hit.

They really glossed over a lot of this stuff in today's presentation, though. The Java stuff was almost like reading off a list. Expect to hear a lot more in the months to come.