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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".
No, that wasn't good trolling by GP at all.
A skilled troll can get people riled up and provoke a bunch of heated answers.
A really skilled troll does it in a controversial way that draws some supporters as well, creating a major flame war.
Just calling someone an idiot does not qualify.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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!
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.
It's not about the language. It's the APIs that matter. Rust couldn't be less relevant.
And frankly J2EE doesn't matter that much either. I haven't seen a purebred J2EE application inn ages. There may exist EJB2 monstrosities deep in the server catacombs of large banks, but nowadays when people say enterprise java, they really just mean java code serving http-requests and running batch-jobs, with a gazillion of 3rd party libraries throw in.
You seem to not know what you're talking about. Java and Python aren't even in the same class of programming languages. Other than C#, please name another language that's good for large businesses? C++ is incorrect. The strict typing and ability to auto-complete are must haves language features for companies with wildly ranging skill levels and churn rates. C++ doesn't have that nor does Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Sure some editors will generate fake auto-complete lists, but its not possible for the editor to list with 100% certainty all the functions and methods and their types in Python and similar (to be fair Java isn't 100% either if you use reflection, but very few projects use those features and novices don't even know they exist).
Remove a well established GUI toolkit? Why? Nothing forces you to use it and many like not having to find and manage more 3rd party libraries. Java comes with all the bells and whistles that you need. Mature and cross platform threading, GUI, networking, file I/O, graphics, images, algorithms, database interfaces, etc... C++ didn't even understand threads until recently. Java is one of the, if not the best, general programming language. Easier and safer to program than C related languages and safer than Python and other 'scripting' languages. There are always trade offs, it isn't the fastest language to program. Though Java is easier to debug than dynamic ones, so initial development speed is a misleading metric.
There are native compilers for Java. You have to know enough to use them when warranted which you clearly don't.
A really skilled troll does it in a controversial way that draws some supporters as well, creating a major flame war.
Just calling someone an idiot does not qualify.
That's a good point. And someone that clever could probably just write an Emacs macro to do the trolling for him.
Google should fork Java (and rename it)
Microsoft already did that. They named it C#.
Vi
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
For those not familiar with java EE, who, like me when I first saw this popping up on the tinterwebs thoght this was remotely a java..
"Java EE" IS NOT what anyone familiar with Java would ever really use.
Its more like a mish mash of highly specialized and mostly irrelevant java projects for corporate customers that I very much doubt anyone but the original client is using.
This is not remotely equivalent to the java JDK we are all familiar with.
At least, as far as I can tell. If someone can point me to something in the Java EE suite that "will be missed", I may change my mind that this is anything other than a few big clients kicking up a fuss that they may have to pay developers to work for them.
Also, while I've seen lots of "pulled developers onto other things", there is no mention of what these "other things" are.
We would all benefit from them de prioritizing java EE and instead devoting those resources to javaFX. imho.
ready to be corrected if I misunderstood.
No, it's actually J# then Microsoft got sued by Sun and had to drop it because Microsoft was intentionally adding in incompatibilities because Microsoft could expect to be the biggest player.
I work for a very large bank heavily invested in Java and while we are largely a Java shop for the Web tiers, most of what's done is no longer J2EE but rather Java in a servlet container with frameworks like Spring or Hibernate. In fact, we're largely shifting off of full fledged Java app servers (WebLogic, WebSphere, etc.) to simpler containers (e.g. Tomcat) as the needs are no longer there. Talking to my peers at the other big bank, it sounds like this is an industry trend.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
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.
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)
Im pretty sure that isnt true.
For example. Tomcat (by apache foundation) is he implimentatiom for some of the more widely used java ee specifications. And is based on vanilla java.
And gives jsp and servlets.
There is a version combined with other java ee components (java tomEE). But Looking to see if it was true that tomcat is java ee is the first time Ive heard of it.
I don't get your post. JNI was in Java since day one (or very early on), and via JNI you can access everything that is platform specific. MS or anyone else can just use JNI to bundle a Jar file for Java to allow access to DirectX and platform specific APIs. Java is not some magic, but it's basically a level above C/C++. The architecture is basically, Java>C>OS>Driver>Hardware. So, MS could have just bundled it's own Java+Windows specific modules.
And to put an browser in Java is also easy. https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrow...
What difference does it make if it's the Chrome engine or some engine written in Java?
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