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James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech
snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."
Even though it's since transitioned to Apache, Oracle still deserves to be graded on their handling of OO.o.
While I applaud James for his contribution to Java, I am afraid he's of no consequence to its direction now.
It would have been better if he proposed some kind of direction Oracle should have taken with Java.
Solaris has actually been quite good since Solaris 10. They have a very worthy replacement for init (the service management framework), a very advanced infrastructure for application debugging and probing (dtrace), and a revolutionary filesystem (ZFS) to name a few things. The only thing that (IMO) sucks is the reliance on the sysv style package manager (which they've since replaced with IPS in Solaris 11; not too familiar with it since our company has largely abandoned Solaris thanks to Oracle, but I am of the opinion they should have went with rpm/yum or dpkg/apt).
The tech is stellar and arguably better than Linux in many respects, but I agree that with the failure of Sun and Oracle to find addressable market with SPARC and no real chance of displacing Linux on x64 that it really is a dead end now. It's too bad Oracle won't invest any time to port some of the better aspects of Solaris to Linux.
That James Gosling fella is of no consequence...
The views of those that have achieved something great or useful tend to be solicited repeatedly, especially if they had a string of achievements.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie? Yep.
Woz? Yep.
Gosling? Yep.
Bogaboga? Unless you are the originator of the "death by booga booga" joke, maybe not. Of course you could be holding out on us.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
People do not seem to notice, is that, whenever oracle tried to acquire some piece of technology specially software wise, that piece of software/tech tends to perish, notable examples are Openoffice (when oracle acquired it, luckilly now that's apache'd), MySQl (luckilly the community revived it through MariaDB). You don't hear much about these anymore. Agreed they did acquire a lot more of software out there that.. well you never hear much of.
I wouldn't be surprised if oracle has a magic algorithm to screw up fine projects, and one would have thought having such huge financial backing will just enhance products, such doesn't seem the case.
To know Oracle is to hate Oracle.
An Oracle Field Engineer shared the secret meaning for the name, "oracle".
One
Rich
Arse
Called
Larry
Ellison
Solaris is appealing in environments that you don't want to change or break. It's very stable.
Think of ZFS along the lines of RAID - it's not a backup or disaster recovery solution. It's performance and disaster prevention (like Shadow Copies in Windows).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Google probably would have made a better offer initially if they had reason to suspect how things were going to play out with oracle. Although I'm sure that everybody realized as soon as Oracle had made an offer for Sun that Google would have been a far better choice than Oracle for Sun's IP, I don't think anyone else expected just how colossally bad Oracle was going to be with it.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of MS being a better choice.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!
I think it's too early to tell, as James Gosling just lacks the experience most people are used to from those like him — there's still a lot left for him to learn from his father, industry veteran Jim Goose. Once his father retires, though, I think James will get to chance to really spread his wings, and we'll probably see some very good ideas of his take flight. For now, though, I think he's just a bit green around the beak.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
That MySQL's space was/is being transferred to MariaDB, instead of just dying a relatively quick death.
Why bother with MySQL if you can just migrate over to PostgreSQL? Yes, of course, some of the weirdest bits won't work, and errors will now (for a change!) actually interrupt your work instead of silently losing information. But it seemed like a good way to kill that ugly beast!
Dhu, The main usage of Java is on the server side, where it's fairly popular. Java skils is still the most sought after skill when it comes to developers. There are a few popular desktop applications written in Java, Minecraft comes to mind :) And of course we have the slightly modified version of Java that powers every Android application. So Java is still around and kicking.....
As to the big Reds handling of Java, out of the gate it was pretty bad in it's interactions with the Java community. Not surprising as they axed most of the folks that where doing that part back at Sun...... But they actually got better with interacting with the Java community lately, could improve more but still kinda on the right track.
SPARC has seen more advances in the 4 years under ORACLE then in the previous 15 years under Sun. I actually enjoy reading about their tech every now and then. But unless they open up Solaris again to attract the open source community the only thing that keeps it alive is backwards compatibility of legacy software.
What? They were doing a pretty good job of pushing you to their AMD servers by making the price/performance ratio of the SPARC gear shit for years.
is totally merited. Solaris was and still is brilliant, one of the best operating systems ever made. The scalability and reliability are legendary. I do not know of any OS that can run on a tiny PC AND on a big-mama cluster with exactly the same code. Solaris is another example of how mergers and corporate acquisitions boil down, most of the time, to sheer destruction of capital. Observed that with tiny companies and start-ups as well as with mega-mergers & acquisitions. Solaris is dead, and I concur with Gosling: I weep.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
ZFS is on the right path but it still isn't quite where it needs to be. For example I can't tell it not to reallocate blocks on write so I can't force overwrites of sensitive data -- which is required in several industries that Sun used to be strong in. Someone in ZFS land needs to create an ioctl/fctl to fix that. The boot system also needs to be clear if it is trying to mount a ZFS or UFS disk since that is a bit tricky when the disk looks like both. They should also fix the fsck stub so it knows about ZFS and have a /usr/lib/zfs/fsck even if it is just a link to zfs status.
How is SMF better than init? They even bothered to break init so you can't pull SMF out the system if you don't want it. They now link init and smf to a number of libraries that have horrible security records. Do you want the main process in your system linking in libraries that need security updates on a monthly basis?
I know how SMF is worse, it is slower to start up, it is indeterminate in its start up state and order, it keeps its data in unauditable binary files an it takes far longer to shut down. It also isn't very good at what init was, which was making sure programs always ran. Solaris 11.1 turns off auditing, then syslog before killing off all user processes which means you have no idea what a rogue process did when it was told the system is shutting down. That appears to be a result of someone at Oracle deciding all the disks need to be mounted before starting syslog, which requires lots of extra crud to be running like NFS, RPC and whatever YP is called this decade and it appears that stuff is all trusted to shut down cleanly without the need of logging. At least with init, you could have two different syslog entries for the different run levels so you could make sure everything was logged and audited.
The number of bugs in Solaris 10 is far worse than Solaris 9. You can't build a light weight Solaris 10 or 11 system. Under 10, you could build a Solaris 9 container which would only run a bare number of processes but not any more since that feature was pulled out of 11. I have a number of Solaris 9 systems that are running less than a dozen packages but I'm one of the people who feel that if there isn't any unneeded software on a system, hackers can't use it hack the system.
Solaris 11 also has managed to break decades of sanity of using ifconfig to build network stacks. Now there are other tools that do part of the job and then can allow ificonfig to finish the job.
At least with Solaris 11.1 they created a tool to create smf xml files which means they are now no longer hand crafted which means a tool can be written to turn them back into rc.X scripts and they can be put back where they belong. Now if I could just remove svc.* without installing a fake to keep the contract open, I would be back up to the integrity level of a Solaris 9 system.
Where is the grade for VirtualBox. As opposed to the others on the list, I would give them an A+ for their stewardship of VirtualBox so far. They have released regular updates and bugfixes. I have run into zero problems running Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows in VMs. The UI has gradually improved. The project is still open source, and they actually provide binaries for every major OS.
A few comments.
Oracle isn't ignoring Solaris for Linux, they are actually putting a fair amount of resources behind Solaris, the issue is licensing cost for non Oracle HW and maybe even more the way the treated the budding OpenSolaris community early on, when they closed the doors on Solaris.
One more thing is kinda where they are focusing their efforts, rather than going after new developers, the focus is on Oracle on Oracle. So even if Oracle are investing in Solaris, they are primarily doing so to run the Oracle stack.
If you "admined Solaris for a few years" a few years back, you should take Solaris 11 for a spin, it's surprisingly fresh and the CLI env can either be configured to use GNU tols like most Linux dists does or old school "Solaris", You might like it.
While Solaris itself is no longer relevant outside of some enterprise niches, it has an actively-developed OSS fork named "illumos", developed by former-Sun hackers working at several different private companies. There are several distributions -- I use SmartOS in particular, and OmniTI's OmniOS is also excellent.
Nope. Andorid is not powered by Java. That's what Oracle would want you to believe. It's like claiming that anything containing flour is a derivative of "bread". Dalvik isn't anything like Java.
It is still there as an optional item in the installer, not selected by default (because that is the way it should be).
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The problem is Java in the client has tainted perception of Java on the server. Many execs (ie the ones the write the cheques) see Java as something untrustworthy and dangerous and really I can't blame them, If they make such braindead decisions on the client side what is to stop them doing equally dumb shit on the server end.
I wish java apps would die, along with the people who wrote them, because they NEVER follow the native platform UI. They are all kind of a native app, only a little more sluggish, and the windows don't look quite right, and the menu's aren't organized properly. All in the name of saving a buck making a cross-platform version or using those highly training Indian programming group that only knows java.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I have had to convert all my Solaris systems to Linux. I weep'.
What has he done - gone w/ Debian? Since Red Hat seems to have stopped supporting the SPARC ages ago, and I'm assuming that Gosling's Solaris systems are SPARCstations or similar. Which makes me wonder - couldn't he have gone w/ OpenIndiana or Schillix? Especially since it seems to have been more recent? I'm assuming that the BSDs were not an option, since he probably wants an SVR4 based Unix.
Even better... Chrome won't even run the java plugin 9 times out of 10. (even then, you have to OK it's running of any applet)
If a VM uses a register base instead of a stack base, does that change the entire VM altogether, rather than simply make it more efficient?
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
I don't agree. I need local sockets and their performance is atrociously bad on Solaris 10 (no, I cannot use shared memory or the other alternatives). Linux performs something like 30 times better. Thread creation, memory management, etc. are also pretty bad. Unfortunately my customer cannot migrate to Linux at the moment, but they are thinking about it pretty intensely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And that's where Java really shines... ah no, wait...
The tech is stellar and arguably better than Linux in many respects, but I agree that with the failure of Sun and Oracle to find addressable market with SPARC and no real chance of displacing Linux on x64 that it really is a dead end now. It's too bad Oracle won't invest any time to port some of the better aspects of Solaris to Linux.
The issue he had was w/ Oracle's pricing of Solaris, and the pricing of their support to the OS, which has effectively killed it. Since Gosling himself had to convert to Linux due to that. He wasn't commenting on any technical aspects to what Solaris now is.
Solaris is relevant only in environments where one is stuck w/ a legacy SPARC based environment. Particularly since the OSs that support SPARC have dwindled - right now, it's just Debian on the Linux side, but all the BSDs - F/O/N on the BSD end.
Otherwise, if one wants ZFS, one could go w/ FreeBSD on either Intel (x64 OR Itanic) or POWER or MIPS.
What is funny is that MS had a Java Virtual Machine in the late 1990s that was infamous for its extensions that led to a Sun lawsuit which eventually led to it being discontinued.
It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.
Are you counting 'Sun' as non-Oracle hardware? B'cos the only vendors who really sold Solaris were SPARC based vendors. HP, Dell or any x64 vendor offers only Linux. But the only people who were left high & dry by Oracle's licensing fees were SPARC owners: others could easily go to Linux or any of the BSDs.
Right now, isn't Solaris really a SPARC only OS, since Oracle supports x64 w/ OEL?
There really were no others. One thing Sun could have done was try getting acquired by Red Hat. That would have made an interesting merger
IMO (shared with many of my peers), Solaris 10 is when it died. And it's entirely because of SMF. It has too much of a Windows Stink(tm) to it... want to change a service configuration, run the SMF equiv of "regedit". The init system has a database -- it replicates ("rolling backup") at startup -- instead of clearly defined, easy to understand, and trivial to edit configuration files. While SMF does add one or two notable features -- automatic dependency trees, parallel startup, error handling... Most of it has already been done with the existing (shell scripted) init framework. And parallel is one of those things that looks good on paper, and sounds good in the conference room, but when actually done just makes a mess. (one any windows users should be very familiar with... the complete inability to use a system for several minutes post-boot because 87 applications are thrashing the disk all trying to start at once. Yes, it's annoying having to sit and watch the machine do nothing for a minute waiting for sendmail's dns lookup to timeout to finish booting, but the start-almost-everything-at-the-same-time alternative is *worse*)
I know that you have such requirements forced on you by others, but with respect that one is quite ridiculous and appears to be a rule from tape or other removable storage or disk disposal that has been badly misapplied to filesystems possibly by accident or teenager writing Quality Assurance rules. If someone gets to your drives at a block level via root on your system or by physical access to the server you are pretty well fucked for a dozen reasons anyway.
IMHO overwrites are something to be done when media is about to leave a "secure" area so not something a filesystem, even one like ZFS, should be bothered about.
If a VM uses a register base instead of a stack base, does that change the entire VM altogether, rather than simply make it more efficient?
It changes it altogether, op codes, and the lot. Its like a different CPU (e.g. Arm or Intel) programs have to be compiled differently to run on them and some things may be more efficient on one and other on the other.
Solaris is dead. Long live Solaris!
(Illumos/illumian/Nexenta/SmartOS, that is...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The only thing that (IMO) sucks is the reliance on the sysv style package manager (which they've since replaced with IPS in Solaris 11; not too familiar with it since our company has largely abandoned Solaris thanks to Oracle, but I am of the opinion they should have went with rpm/yum or dpkg/apt).
A better option would have been FreeBSD's combination of Portsng and PBIs
for ignoring solaris in favor of linux
I admined solars for years and it was always a confusing blend of bsd and system v, it is hard to imagine how much cruft could have built up over the past three decades. It is not difficult to see how focusing on linux would seem appealing
But didn't Sun move away from BSDisms when they moved from BSD based SunOS to SVR4 based Solaris?
Ignoring their x86 servers in favor of selling pricey sparc gear (because the sales reps made bigger commissions) was part of the reason that sun passed away in the first place
But had they gone w/ x86 servers, they'd have been trampled by the likes of Dell, HP/Compaq/DEC, IBM - all of who were far more established in that space. Besides, had they gone w/ x86, they'd have been right up against Microsoft Windows Server as well. So it made sense for Sun to stick w/ SPARCS.
What they could have done - try proliferating the market w/ SPARC boxes at different configurations w/ different price points. Solaris for top end servers, FBSD or Linux for SPARC workstations, Linux for SPARC laptops, OBSD for routers, NBSD for consoles and so on. That would have helped the SPARC become popular. As it is, Alpha, PA-RISC & MIPS had folded, so this was a golden opportunity for Sun, and later Oracle, to try proliferating the SPARC as an alternative to x86. Particularly once Apple had abandoned PowerPC for x86.
There were some alternate SPARC vendors like Integrix & Tatung. Had they been able to run w/ Linux/SPARC, that could have been quite a viable platform.
AFAIK authors had to fork and rename it to "Jenkins" after Oracle filed for trademark for original name "Hudson".
I hate Oracle with passion, although they seem to be doing OK job with Java.
--Coder
You can have a native platform UI with Java if you use SWT instead of Swing or JavaFX. There is some benefit to be had from Java applications looking uniform across all operating systems, however.
Maybe the guts of it aren't. To a developer though, Dalvik is 95% Java.
I'd agree that Java UIs are not as good as native ones. But, in the niches where you typically see Java clients such as enterprise apps, what do you do? You can write web applications, which are often not better if they're anything more than a simple or one-off interaction. You could use Flash/Adobe AIR, which is also not better in UI terms. (My favourite gripe is that neither handle keyboard interaction well, but it's far from the only one). Or you could encourage your IT department to write a native application and get something of similar quality and for Windows only.
What's happening with mobile devices is leaving an interesting situation here because the OS makers seem to be rather discouraging non-native apps. That might water down the advantage of (standard) Java. But I think there's still always going to be high demand from 'enterprise' software developers for a way of writing one client they can run across many devices. I very much suspect that the alternative will be to shove everything in a web app instead.
Since a few years (java 6u10), it's quite easy to have native look-and-feel for everything. No need for SWT, which is an outdated hack. All java apps that I've been used for years (IDE's, various clients) have a native look-and-feel, you can't tell it's not native.
They both use the Java language.
Minecraft, as ugly as it is, is rather popular and written in Java and leveraged the JVM quite a bit. As long the children have a desire to try and find Hero Brine or build their own little words, Java will be around for a while.
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
Having a non-standard and unreliable user interface tends to make your application less usable (and in some cases unusable). It doesn't matter if you think java is more reliable than something else if it's not meeting its UI requirements. BTW, crashing less because less people can use your application does not mecessarily mean it's more reliable overall. It just means you've successfully prevented your users from finding all of your bugs.
No. He didn't "reach out to Oracle", he "contacted Oracle" or "asked Oracle". He didn't "reach out" like some emo teenager to their ex girlfriend. It's not as if the phrase "reach out to" is shorter, it's three words where one word will do.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
They both use the Java language.
They both use Java language compiled to different byte codes, just as if you could write a C program and compile it for an arm machine or an intel machine.
If your server handles anything worth actual money, OpenBSD on Sparc64 is the way to go. Of course you might need to know what you are doing, and have confidence that Sparc hardware will survive under Oracle (that is the toughest requirement of all).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The problem with products bought by Oracle is that if you're small and they suddenly decide to ask for a lot of money for what was previously free, you're screwed.
Better to take preemptive action and switch away from them as soon as possible.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Integer priorities mean I have absolute control.
The current system has no guarantee of any order of anything. This means if you get hacked at a non privileged user level, that process can hang around until it gets the "system is shutting down" signal, then do a quick fork/exec a few times and keep running until the system sends it a kill -9. Meanwhile it has a system without syslog running and without any auditing running. Take advantage of something running a broken xml library that runs setuid, and you own the system until it power off and nothing is logged at all.
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
Just to be clear, you're upset that Google's attempt to take over the web doesn't play well with competing technologies? I do hope you're not surprised by this. You're helping Google shit on the web.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
as many people do - get a copy of an app inspector - I recommend Addons Detector - and use it to see what dev tools were used for build the apps on your phone. You'll be surprised to see just how many were built with the NDK. All the fast and responsive games are at least.
Just as an aside it was also very fast compared to the standard (Netscape) one. Arguably the Microsoft Java VM is what made Java viable for clients and led to the success of Java. I understand why Sun did what they did, in that suit but even in retrospect it is hard to evaluate if they made the right choice.
> If your server handles anything worth actual money, OpenBSD on Sparc64 is the way to go.
You're funny.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Why the fuck would they want to port Solaris' better aspects to their competitor, when Solaris is still a billion dollar business for Oracle?
Linux is even bigger business for Oracle. Even 10 years ago, companies were trying to figure out how to ditch the large boxes that you are trying to drool over so hard.
Oracle helped quite a bit in that regard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
MS only knows how to do one platform: Windows. When they make new languages, they're completely tied to their own platform, and useless on others. No one uses C# outside of Windows.
To be fair, C# is also used in Unity3D development, which is multi-platform.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Personal opinion of course.
We have SPARC gear along with Solaris 10. When we wanted to upgrade the hardware from the T2000's, the cost for Oracle licenses went through the roof. So we stuck with T2000's (still have them). It kept us from purchasing new Sun hardware. No new hardware, no new business for Sun.
After much investigation, we went with Dell hardware and Redhat and have been spinning up Redhat VM's right and left. For the mission critical stuff we're using HP gear and HP-UX. We've been spinning up Informix, MySQL, and PostGreSQL in place of Oracle as well.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
You're absolutely correct. We are a Solaris shop transitioning out to Linux on VMs. Solaris is wonderfully stable and reliable and Sun supported it well. We liked it a lot. But it was already becoming unaffordable before Oracle took them over and now you simply can't afford it, no matter how pretty it is. We won't be buying any more SPARC hardware, ever.
It was a great idea some 10 years ago, probably drove Swing where it is now. I use both Eclipse and Netbeans, and the former is the one looking like the bloated slow memory hog to me ;-)
I wish java apps would die, along with the people who wrote them, because they NEVER follow the native platform UI.
Client side Java would be alive and popular if they'd made the Windows Look-and-feel the default. Or just given up on Metal entirely.
Your other complaints are the fault of the developer, not the platform.
:wq
"...and Sun supported it well." Oh you've GOT to be kidding. The only thing worse than Sun's support has been ORACLE's support.
So what can you program in that those execs will give you a green light for? I mean they really don't make good decisions off of their choices. They really just pick what they think they like.
PHP/Python/Ruby etc... It is those nasty open source freeware programs that may be out of style in a few year, we don't want to use those. (and they don't seem to have those mythical enterprise features that they want, but yet never tell us what they are)
C/C++ Too cumbersome to code in, doesn't allow for Rapid Development
C#/VB.NET Well they are fine for little apps, we want something a little more heavy duty. Sometimes you will get a better debate about needing a more scailable servers then what Microsoft can provide.
COBOL/FORTRAN/FoxPro etc... These old languages.
Unfortunately Java, even with its security problems is seen as the best enterprise choice, because Companies thinks for some ungodly stupid reason that Enterprise software is some how good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All fine and good, until you go to your next platform.
Java is nice in although your UI get kinda antiquated, the program will run on Windows, Linux, OS X and some other. So if you have a major upgrade to your OS and it still supports Java, chances are your App will still run.
Unlike say going from Windows XP 32bit to Windows 7 64bit. Where you old app written back for Windows 98 will no longer run.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or the fact that Java code is married to its JVM. Want to move from 6.x to 7.x? Time to rewrite your code. Want to use a JVM on a Mac? Rewrite your Windows JVM code. Similar with Linux.
Java had a promise of write once, run anywhere. That has been broken. Now, it seems to be install once, get hacked anywhere, because the only breach OS X has ever had in its existance that was widespread was due to JVM insecurity.
Have you read "man inittab" on any system V derived? action=respawn means it will ALWAYS run at the listed run levels. Sort of like how it runs the svc daemon does now. Whoever planned the new system just didn't get "init".
SMF only runs things as long as the contract system works.
As far as writing sensitive data to disks, do you know about the "real world?" Take a look at any online credit card system in the world. You will find people enter their card number as their email address, shipping address, reference number. You will find admins sending stuff like "can you fix 4111 1111 .... 1111 for me?" SSNs flow like water as well. Some times you must scrub the empty space on the disk or scrub stuff you know was just wrong. ZFS has NO ability to do that and that is a MAJOR FLAW!!!!!
ifconfig isn't about the stack. It is a tool to tell the stack what to do and has been for more than 3 decades. Inventing new tools to do the same job was pure incompetence.
Solaris was made in a time when there were almost hundreds of flavors of UNIX. Everyone had their own different variant.
When SunOS 1.x to 4.x were out, those were extremely BSD. It wasn't until the renaming to Solaris and Solaris 2.x when Sun moved to a SVR4 base.
I do miss Sun though. SPARC hardware was extremely well built. Now, Oracle hardware just looks like any other machine sitting in a rack. Plus, it was nice having another CPU architecture than x86 that was commonly available.
Solaris 11 has had a couple security changes that are interesting. For example, root is gone by default until you use rolemod. Instead, UID 0's functionality is a role, where you su for that access, similar to how one uses UAC in Windows to access administrator functionality that your account has.
ZFS is also one of the most useful features of the OS. No LVM to worry about, and far better bitrot catching than any other filesystem except for MS's Storage Spaces + ReFS.
I still like Solaris and SPARC, but for the cost involved in the enterprise (where commercial support is necessary), I can get 95% of the features (all except ZFS [1]) for a lot less hardware investment.
[1]: My only complaint about Linux in general is that it doesn't have an enterprise-grade modern filesystem. btrfs is still not finalized yet (and it can't be booted from), and a true enterprise grade filesystem merges the LVM and the FS to be able to catch bitrot and file corruption via CRCs. Without both layers working at the same time, that protection isn't there. Even MS tossed out the LVM with Storage Spaces.
All java apps that I've been used for years (IDE's, various clients) have a native look-and-feel, you can't tell it's not native.
Yes, I can.
Pretty much every Java app uses non-native File Open/Save dialog boxes, even when the rest of the app does look correct.
ZFS is a decent alternative to having a "smarter" SAN. One can buy a VNX and have real time deduplication, encryption, snapshots [1], async replication, etc.
Intead, one can buy a "dumb" array, something that might just take disks, run JBOD, or go with RAID5, or RAID6, and let the OS do the work from there with deduplication, encryption, etc. With ZFS, a directory of critical files can be protected with RAID1 while everything else on that filesystem is RAID5 or RAID6. An occasional scrub of the pool will catch any bit rot that might happen, and if one adds SSD, the filesystem will know to autotier it.
Of course, we have seen this before. Ages ago, there was a push to move to software RAID from hardware controllers back around the turn of the century. However, a few years after that, it was back to hardware RAID controllers and the software just using it as a plain disk.
[1]: Careful with snapping over 3-8 terabytes, or you will have a very unpleasant experience, unless this was fixed.
The POWER8 will be an interesting CPU architecture. It is the first since PowerPC that is available for license to anyone other than IBM. May not mean much, but I'd love to have a generic PC or server running Linux and not x86, although in reality, this is a pipe dream.
I wonder if SPARC is still an open CPU model, although the days of the Tatung or other clones are gone.
Both were ported to just about every CPU in existence - x64/x86, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Power/POWER. FreeBSD even exists on Itanic, which NetBSD doesn't support, while support for Alpha has been dropped from FreeBSD. Given that FreeBSD now has a laptop version called PC-BSD, I see little reason why such a solution can't run on a similar range of non-x64 platforms. NetBSD too - given that Minix uses the NetBSD userland, NetBSD could itself run on big servers, while sit on top of Minix for embedded applications.
Yep, they have done so well with it that everyone turns JAVA off in their browsers. Gotta love the lack of security it gives.
Are you confusing javascript with JAVA? None of the browsers I use come with built in JAVA. I have to install it if I want to use it. Javascript, on the otherhand, is a totally different story.
Java tainted perception of Java on the server - all those Enterprise program's we're forced to use, they tole us all how good Java is.
The only thing Java has going for it is the salesmen for the shitty consultancies who sell such crap to the management.
So your solution on the server side is what, .Net? How is that significantly any better than Java on the server?
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
Having a non-standard and unreliable user interface tends to make your application less usable (and in some cases unusable). It doesn't matter if you think java is more reliable than something else if it's not meeting its UI requirements. BTW, crashing less because less people can use your application does not mecessarily mean it's more reliable overall. It just means you've successfully prevented your users from finding all of your bugs.
In the enterprise, where JAVA is primarily used, I'm pretty sure you will find that reliability and functionality outweigh UI requirements. The prettiest UI in the world is worthless if the application doesn't do what is needed. Hell, all of those VB apps had crappy interfaces, but people used them all the time. Besides, today, JAVAs primary use is server-side and there isn't any UI requirement.
You can have a native platform UI with Java if you use SWT instead of Swing or JavaFX. There is some benefit to be had from Java applications looking uniform across all operating systems, however.
I would second this (not the SWT part but the uniformity accross operating systems). Look at various apps that run in browsers (regardless of the technology involved). None of them have a native look and feel, but if you are on a PC or Mac or tablet or use IE or Firefox or Chrome, as long as the rendering works, people are happy.
Native look and feel is nice in theory, but the reality is that with the rise of the internet, it is no longer relevant.
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
All true, but let's not forget that SWT was never meant to be used for general applications. From the start, it was created to develop the Eclipse IDE. The fact that other people used it for their own purposes doesn't change that.
wha? .net? me?
I think you have me confused with someone else.....
I do serious software, where my skill with the tools mean I don't have such a productivity hit as others who need java or .net to keep up. I prefer C/C++ but I do turn my hand to quite a few different technologies as appropriate.
wha? .net? me?
I think you have me confused with someone else.....
I do serious software, where my skill with the tools mean I don't have such a productivity hit as others who need java or .net to keep up. I prefer C/C++ but I do turn my hand to quite a few different technologies as appropriate.
Server side programming in C/C++ can be done and many do, but I would question why? Since most server side work is to serve up various web pages, they tend to be constrained by IO not memory or cpu. Not only is there the initial development time, which seems not to be an issue for you, given your sill level, but there is also maintenance work, where the next person might not have your level of expertise in C/C++.
Just like Java can be used for client side programming, although it isn't optimum, it would seem that C/C++ would not be the first choice on server side. As for Anything.Net, I only use it if a client or project requires it. I find that it is good at doing many things, but not great at any of them. The one thing it has going for it is that it is a Microsoft technology, so decision makers who don't necessarily know any better tend to specify it in the requirements. That keeps it alive and kicking. In the 60s and 70s, the old adage was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Today, the old adage still rings true if you substitute "Microsoft" for "IBM" at least at the enterprise level.
a) they're symbolic links. b) if you cannot count (S01 happens before S02, etc.), then you have no place fucking with a *NIX system.
The claim that SMF does away with all those nasty shell scripts is an absolute and complete LIE. It just has them in different places. After installing Solaris 10 for the first time, I dug deep into the "init replacement"; the shell scripts were still there -- just not in /etc/init.d -- retooled to use the SMF DB instead of simple, everybody-know-about-them everybody-knows-how-to-use-them config files.
The issue with serialized vs. parallel boot is the lie of efficiency. The push for parallel is the task that sits idle waiting for an outside event. The thing that camp fails to understand is the possible (and often very real) I/O contention from too many processes reading and writing at startup, which can (and does) make boot actually take longer. It's a fine line they don't know how to walk.
No, it's more of a "how many times do I let you fool me" kind of thing. Google has learned Java is not something that can NOT be trusted. As a result, chrome will refuse to load some versions entirely, others nags about constantly, and even the current latest versions require user confirmation before running the known-to-be-buggy-as-hell system.
While I find it annoying, I do agree with them.
Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead â" Because HTML5 delivered way better.
It's pretty sad when your carefully designed platform-neutral architecture intended to supplant native code, in development for 20 years, can be overturned by an SGML derivative and an ad hoc script language.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I wouldn't lump C# in with VB.NET. C# is a lot closer to Java and they both hit about the same market segment. Both are equally capable for large projects.
The main advantage of Java over C# is cross-platform compatibility for your business logic / business objects. It's the COBOL of the next 20-30 years. A good read is "Java: The Good Parts" (published in 2010 by O'Reilly).
Use C# and you're stuck running on Microsoft software stacks (or *maybe* Mono, if you are brave).
We spent 2 years looking at various languages as we moved off VB6/VBScript/ASP. Locking ourselves into C# was not an option. PHP and a lot of the other languages fail to scale past 100k lines of code. Ultimately settling in on Java / Spring for anything that was going to be more then 5k lines of code.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Solaris has actually been quite good since Solaris 10.
Solaris 10 was developed and released (in 2005) by Sun, five years before Oracle acquired them.
I used to run Solaris on my UltraSPARC boxes at home until Oracle made that very difficult.
I'm afraid that SPARC and Solaris are now nothing but historical curiosities to all but the wealthiest who are locked in to Oracle's platform.
It's too bad Oracle won't invest any time to port some of the better aspects of Solaris to Linux.
There's no point. While Oracle tries to milk the cash cow and sweat their assets, Linux will gradually overtake Solaris all on its own.
Oracle will begin the fade into obscurity like the other dinosaurs before it (ICL, Tandem, DEC, Compaq, HP, Microsoft...)
Stick Men
Apparently, it still is - Oracle didn't do to them what they did w/ OpenSolaris
Sun's acquisition quickly went down the drain, when Oracle started killing off things, Open Solaris, OpenOffice, MySQL and on and on.
Its a common fallacy that server side stuff if just shuffling disk to network, hence the (current, but fading) popularity of node.js
What I find in all systems that are not trivial is that the middle tier gets a lot of processing bundled into it - read that disk or DB data, and fiddle with it, often combining it with other data sources and then send it down to a client. That fiddling requires quite a bit of processing.
Its one reason why Microsoft went as native-code as it did a couple of years back, their 'Casablanca' project (now released as C++ REST Services) because someone measured how much electricity their cloud services were sucking up with managed code (and to be fair, .NET is less resource intensive than many script-based languages) and they needed something more efficient. (Either that or someone noticed how seriously faster C WWS web services were compared to .NET WCF services :-) )
All the places I've worked that do serious stuff, base their distributed services over 3 tiers - the usual web presentation (or sometimes thick desktop) calling a middle tier business logic layer that calls the DB. The middle tier does all the heavy lifting, so its never just IO shuffling.
I'm sure many websites simply call a web server that calls a DB and does the mapping of data to UI in the client via javascript, but its not the most efficient way of presenting that, especially if there's a lot of data, or it needs processing.
Maybe there;'s a distinction to be made between the "website" devs and the "professional" devs in the type of systems they develop. I think its a shame the "website" style where everything is placed in the web server (bad security choice that) should be designed with 3 tiers from the start, and for these types of system, a C++ based service layer is not any more difficult than any other language to develop for. .NET, its easy to develop for, which is why everyone seems to be using it. Its not nice when it goes wrong (like the bug I struggle with today - reading event log entries returns null on my colleague's box, for no F*** good reason.. damn you Microsoft) but even Microsoft knows its their RAD tool, not the one that should be used for performance or resource efficient systems. To put it another way, .NET is the new Visual Basic - where VB used to be used, .NET fills that gap. The trouble is, it also attempts to fill every other gap (but I guess VB devs back in the day used to do that anyway)
Java.. no need for that anywhere IMHO :-)
Maybe there;'s a distinction to be made between the "website" devs and the "professional" devs in the type of systems they develop. I think its a shame the "website" style where everything is placed in the web server (bad security choice that) should be designed with 3 tiers from the start, and for these types of system, a C++ based service layer is not any more difficult than any other language to develop for. .NET, its easy to develop for, which is why everyone seems to be using it. Its not nice when it goes wrong (like the bug I struggle with today - reading event log entries returns null on my colleague's box, for no F*** good reason.. damn you Microsoft) but even Microsoft knows its their RAD tool, not the one that should be used for performance or resource efficient systems. To put it another way, .NET is the new Visual Basic - where VB used to be used, .NET fills that gap. The trouble is, it also attempts to fill every other gap (but I guess VB devs back in the day used to do that anyway)
Java.. no need for that anywhere IMHO :-)
With regards to .Net, it provides a very good IDE, but overall, it occupies the same use case as Java, at least C# does. C# does do many things better than Java, but if one has to maintain legacy code or is involved with non-Windows platforms, .Net isn't an answer. Ultimately, I think that was Microsoft's purpose of .Net, not to build a better Java, but to lock people in to their products.
With Java or C/C++ or just about any other language, it is platform neutral (that doesn't mean what one develops is cross-platform, though). I can run those on anything from a pc to a cluster to a mainframe. That is not the case, at least not out of the box, with .Net applications. They are microsoft-centric.
Java is still really useful if your middle tier isn't on a Microsoft platform. Java is like COBOL. Everybody wants it to die, but there is a lot of legacy code out there that needs to be maintained and it will be around for a very long time.
SPARC International Inc. was independent of Sun and is independent of Oracle. The ISA will stay royalty free, no one can/want to change that.
That's why for people w/ such old unixstations, a better idea would be to run OpenBSD or NetBSD on them (I'd imagine FreeBSD no longer supports x32). But if you are talking about SBUS era hardware, SATA didn't exist then - all you had was PATA, and since we're talking about reusing such old boxes, rather than making new computers based on SPARC
Actually, one more option - MINIX v2 - not the current v3 microkernel - too was 32 bit only and would probably support the hardware that you describe. But I think you'd miss some of the Solaris features you're used to if you go by that one.