Slashdot Mirror
Google Backs Out of JavaOne
snydeq writes "Citing concerns about Oracle's lawsuit against it, Google has backed out of the upcoming JavaOne conference. 'Oracle's recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally,' Google's Joshua Bloch said in a blog post. The move may signal eventual fragmentation for Java, with Google conceivably splintering off the Java-like language it uses for Android."
Java's death means .NET and Windows in the server arena. Do you really want that?
Java is the defacto standard for most server apps these days as portals are replacing terminals and Java is used for industrial websites as well. This is truly horrible and no php or perl can not just replace it for mission critical servers. It is not hte language but the 200,000 methods and api's to choose from. Only .NET comes close ... not Mono.
http://saveie6.com/
No, we are seeing a loss of confidence in Oracle. Unfortunately, Oracle now owns Java. That means its future is a little foggy. Oracle has a serious hard-on for Java, which you can see because it is the only major database I know of that allows you to use Java in place of PL/SQL. Disclaimer: I haven't actually done this, but I did read about it while googling some issues I was having with an Oracle database.
I think there is room for two cross-platform environments such as .NET and Java. Right now, those are the players. I don't see the F/OSS community putting all their eggs in Microsoft's basket, even if people do use Mono to some extent. If Oracle succeeds in making Java their pool boy and effectively neutering OSS implementations of the language and JFC, another environment will need to rise to to the occasion. I think it would be a community effort to some degree, but driven largely by Google. I could see them forking Java and realizing that due to trademark and patent concerns they would need to make large changes, so they would make major changes, add a bunch of stuff, and turn it into one hell of a platform for mobile and network development. That was Java's original goal, but it has since bloated up well beyond that and I do mean bloat, not grow. Why do we need a total of three implementations of core JFC classes to do stuff like "read a JPEG," and two of them either don't work at all or only work if you drink unicorn blood while coding? Why are there two GUI implementations, and the one that makes sense is still a zombie built on top of decaying pieces of the AWT corpse?
Sun had so many opportunities to grow the JFC, add value, etc. but due to their intense fear of breaking backwards compatibility, they just layered more and more band-aids and duct tape on top of each other. At some point you need to do it right with new implementations and say "upgrade to version X, and deprecated crap is being removed. You are now warned."
Also, Java EE needs to be merged into Java SE. There should be two Javas. One for memory-constrained devices (embedded), and one for everywhere else. Java EE has been a pain in my ass for some time. Java doesn't need the extra complexity.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
> In summary, open source Java is fine, open source almost-Java is not.
Where is the difference? Isn't that legal newspeak of corporate lawyers... and why we have a free software movement? I can't see how this sentence makes any sense to an open source developer.
you can't even consider using some algorithms that c programmers use all the time
Like buffer overruns.
-=Maggie Leber=-
... anybody wanting to write truly high performance software had really better get used to writing in lower-level languages, or at the very least, understanding their stack right down to the hardware level.
This has always been the case.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Having a good reputation among the slashdot crowd may be more important than you think. Oracle's name is quickly becoming mud in the minds of of a lot of developers, and while in the short term that may mean little to them, it will probably bite them in the ass down the road. Developers may not make purchasing decisions for the kinds of large companies that purchase Oracle's products, but they make do make technical ones, and they also advise the people who make those purchasing decisions.
The article you link says it became the number one server side scripting language in 2002. While there isn't a really clear boundary of what is and isn't a "scripting" language, Java isn't included in any of the definitions generally used for that category, so in a discussion of Java, PHP's position among "scripting" languages -- server side or otherwise -- is pretty much irrelevant.
It's not that hard - just do like your mother taught you - put things back when you're finished with them.
Two things. First it is hard. It takes an almost anal level of attention to detail especially in a multi-threaded environment. That's something woefully missing in your run of the mill programmer. Second, the bugs introduced can be EXTREMELY subtle and VERY difficult to find especially in a multi-threaded environment.
Anecdote: I was working on a multi-threaded realtime system that involved message queues between objects interacting with hardware. The queuing system was developed by someone else and had gone through extensive testing. I was tasked with adding network communications to the messaging system. With the network communications module added it was core dumping at random times and places generally after days of running. I spent over a month trying to find the problem in my code. All the while, the people who had developed the messaging system insisted the problem couldn't be there and showed me the months of tests result on the messaging system. After over a month, including line by line review of my code, I started looking over the messaging system code I found one place where they were releasing a mutex then freeing some memory. 2 lines of code that were reversed amongst 1000's of lines of code. Their testing didn't reveal it because on their test runs there was almost no random variance in the execution. Everything responded at fixed intervals and the pattern never including something getting a pointer to that memory after the mutex was released and before it was freed. The network communications added randomness which disrupted the pattern and this happened periodically.
Who is John Galt?