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Oracle May Have Stopped Funding and Developing Java EE (arstechnica.com)
While anticipating new features in Java 9, developers also have other concerns, according to an anonymous Slashdot reader:
ArsTechnica is reporting that Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from Java EE, the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren't otherwise based on Java, and customers and partners have invested time and code. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened, but the implications are huge for Java as a platform.
"It's a dangerous game they're playing..." says one member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee. "It's amazing -- there's a company here that's making us miss Sun." Oracle's former Java evangelist even left the company in March and became a spokesman for the "Java EE Guardians," who have now created an online petition asking Oracle to "clarify" its intent and resume development or "transfer ownership of Java EE 8".
"It's a dangerous game they're playing..." says one member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee. "It's amazing -- there's a company here that's making us miss Sun." Oracle's former Java evangelist even left the company in March and became a spokesman for the "Java EE Guardians," who have now created an online petition asking Oracle to "clarify" its intent and resume development or "transfer ownership of Java EE 8".
I think companies like Redhat (JBoss) and IBM and SAP disagree, they make plenty of money with Java.
Also I see plenty of JDeveloper commercial licenses in Enterprises.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This affects less people and it is way less dramatic than what the summary implies. Java EE it's just a bunch of "enterprise" frameworks which run on top of the Java virtual machine. Many people using the Java platform don't even bother with Java EE and use other set of frameworks instead (like Spring or Hibernate), and even for those using some of the Java EE technologies, they are most likely using some third party (IBM Websphere) or open source (lJBoss, Tomcat) implementations, since the "official" Java EE implementation by Sun (and later Oracle) never gained much traction.
I make a decent living off writing Java code, and after Java 8 came out I started liking it, not just tolerating it. Lambdas and method references, which I thought would be a nice-to-have, has turned it into a completely new language, streams are great, the multi-threading support is not too shabby and the new time API was loooong overdue.
When reading the linked list (no pun) of new features though, all I can say is "meh"...
Stuff like HTTP/2, TIFF and JSON support should be external, upgradable, libraries. Its a common theme that the standard java libraries fall into disuse after a while, because external library writers do a much better job of implementing the same concepts. JDBC, Date/Calendar, XML processing, HTTP are just a few examples.
My key takeaway from this is that I'm a bit tempted to start using _ as an identifier name, just to fuck over any future maintainers of my code.
The do not make money because the "own" Java, they make money because they "use" Java...
Big difference there. The owner of Java would probably love to get a portion of the money that these users of Java are making. This would be realized through a licensing stream... which may be the end game of scaring customers into thinking that the current public product is going to get shit-canned
More precisely, Java EE is a collection of APIs.What most people are accustomed to is the Java SE API, which is part of the JDK. EE is implemented, partly or in full, by application servers.
Although not all APIs in EE are widespread, some are pretty much the basis of Java application servers such as Tomcat, Jboss/Wildfly, Jetty, Glassfish and co.
For example, Servlet and JSP are part of Java EE. While they are old specs and haven't changed dramatically through recent releases, I am pretty sure any Web developer using Java knows what servlets are or interacted with them indirectly.
Now whether any of this will be missed is a matter of taste, but Java EE, at least part of it, is hardly something used only by high-ends customers.