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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".
Sun couldn't make any money off Java. Sun wasn't incompetent, they were stuck in a business model that became irrelevant (selling high end hardware). It's all well and good to say you should pivot to SaaS but that means selling access to software. If Oracle tries that with Java the community will just fork the damn thing. Where is the business model with Java that makes Oracle enough money to cover the expense of buying Sun? It wasn't in enforcing copyrights on Google, they lost that fight. What they're left with is really nice tech that can't make anyone a dime...
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This is Oracle playing it's usual games and it's introducing a hiccup in the J2EE lifecycle, it's ultimately not going to matter. If Oracle does take it's toys and go home because of the Google decision, IBM, RedHat and others will happily step in to create the O2EE alliance with other major players and life will go on. The J2EE server market is dominated by Tomcat and JBoss/WildFly, Weblogic has roughly 10%. Oracle can certainly cause trouble but they are in no position to kill J2EE.
I see no less than 5 independent, certified implementations of latest Java 7 EE spec, including one LGPL application server; Wildfly by Red Hat. I'm pretty sure the "community" can handle evolving the standards going forward, and it's blatently obvious that Java EE doesn't actually need Oracle's implementation for anything. Is anything of value being lost here?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Actually, Sun's OFFICIAL beef with J# was the fact that it made it easy to directly use things like DirectX and MSIE. They were afraid that if Microsoft got its way, Java would rapidly cease to be platform-independent... or at least, writing Java apps that could only build & run under Windows would have been enormously easier than writing platform-agnostic apps.
The catch is, most of the things Sun was pissed at Microsoft for allowing J# developers to do were things that "pure Java" couldn't do AT ALL, because Sun couldn't be arsed to even TRY to give developers a comparable -- let alone superior -- alternative to platform-dependent features (though apparently, Apple deserves a hefty chunk of the blame, too).
Three specific examples:
* Embedding a browser in a Window. J# made it absurdly easy. The last time I checked, it's STILL a royal pain to do this with Java (and AFAIK, the only way is with Firefox and JNI).
* Using DirectX. OpenGL ultimately won the battle for the hearts & minds of developers (mostly because Microsoft tried to use DirectX as a tool to bully Windows 7 gamers into instaling Windows 8, and it backfired when users revolted and developers were forced to switch to OpenGL to remain competitive), but back in the J# era, DirectX was ENORMOUSLY nicer to develop with compared to OpenGL.
* Using Microsoft-specific APIs to do things like monitor directories for changed files, interact with the system tray & taskbar, etc... things that Java didn't really have any good way to do natively until sometime around JDK6 or JDK7 (taskbar might have been JDK5, but I'm pretty sure monitoring filesystem paths for changes didn't exist until JDK7's NIO2)