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Why Oracle Should Cede Control of Java SE (infoworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
Now that Oracle wants to turn over leadership of enterprise Java's (Java EE's) development to a still-unnamed open source foundation, might the same thing happen with the standard edition of Java (Java SE) that Oracle also controls? Such a move could produce substantial benefits... Oracle said it has no plans to make such a move. But the potential fruits of a such a move are undeniable.
For one, a loosening of Oracle's control could entice other contributors to Java to participate more... [W]ith the current Oracle-dominated setup, other companies and individuals could be reluctant to contribute a lot if they see it as benefiting a major software industry provider -- and possible rival -- like Oracle... Indeed, the 22-year-old language and platform could be given a whole new lease on life, if the open source community rises to the occasion and boosts participation...
Despite the potential to grow Java SE by ceding control, Oracle seems content to hold on to its place as the steward of JDK development. But that could change given the tempestuous relationship Oracle has with parts of the Java community. Oracle has been at loggerheads with the community over both Java SE and Java EE... Oracle may at some point decide it is easier to just cede control rather than having to keep soothing the ruffled feathers that keep occurring among its Java partners.
For one, a loosening of Oracle's control could entice other contributors to Java to participate more... [W]ith the current Oracle-dominated setup, other companies and individuals could be reluctant to contribute a lot if they see it as benefiting a major software industry provider -- and possible rival -- like Oracle... Indeed, the 22-year-old language and platform could be given a whole new lease on life, if the open source community rises to the occasion and boosts participation...
Despite the potential to grow Java SE by ceding control, Oracle seems content to hold on to its place as the steward of JDK development. But that could change given the tempestuous relationship Oracle has with parts of the Java community. Oracle has been at loggerheads with the community over both Java SE and Java EE... Oracle may at some point decide it is easier to just cede control rather than having to keep soothing the ruffled feathers that keep occurring among its Java partners.
I think they acquired Sun (and Java as a result) as a dick move towards Google. If they had any inclination to do so, way back then would have been the opportune time. Doing so now would be seen as admitting defeat (as if the court loss wasn't a big enough statement).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Yeah, it's the #1 language on TIOBE index by a large margain, but it's dead. Sure. Ok.
Is there something about the millennial generation to just convince themselves what they like to be true? I mean, I think Justin Beiber is the worst, but I don't pretend that everyone hates him and his career is over.
Come back to reality kid. Java is used now more than ever, and will continue to be used for a very long time.
But the potential fruits of a such a move are undeniable.
How are these "potential fruits" going to help Oracle? I ask because that's the only thing Oracle actually cares about.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Public corporations tend to do things to benefit themselves. Oracle fought to get APIs covered by copyright -- and won. That's a step backward in the US software world in an amazing amount. Yes, the court didn't make Google pay because fair-use, but fair-user is judged on a case-by-case basis _at trial_. So going forward, because of Oracle's greed and unbending desire to control all of Java everything (and Android) all software developers in the US have this API pitfall to watch out for.
Second, even if there is no direct benefit, there's no indirect benefit to Oracle to open-source Java (or anything). So long as they can extract complex licensing and other fees from everyone wanting to use Java (EE) or the JDK or the API... that's exactly how they work.
Oracle wants to dominate The Market, All Markets, and Larry Ellison has an ego to rival anyone. Unfortunately people with large egos are unable to make decisions that benefit anyone other than themselves.
E
Netflix's backend is Java, among others. Java 8 / Spring Boot / Hibernate / Hysterix / Eureka is an extremely capable setup.
Java EE and JSP is old and shitty, but it doesn't mean all of Java is.
Not might be; is fully and completely retarded. Nosql has replaced SQL, seriously? That's the same level of stupidity that has people here declaring Java dead.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would think that the sheer number of job available that need it is what is contributing to it's "perceived popularity".
But of course, the number of jobs in which one would use a programming language is certainly a piss-poor indicator of any true merit it might have, right?
(eye-roll)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Java > .NET in every conceivable way.
Oh really? Take a look at the feature by feature comparison of C# and Java. C# supports both more and better features than Java and the .NET class library is richer in both breadth and depth. And where is Oracle in the cloud these days? The two biggest players right now are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google and Apple are both working on their cloud offerings, but they're still behind AWS and Azure. Oracle isn't even in the race. Oracle views the cloud as "pay us to run our software products for you on our servers", not as a development platform for independent software that might even compete with their cash cow business applications and database business. In many ways Oracle is where Microsoft used to be during the Steve Ballmer administration a decade ago, before Satya Nadella took over. Under Nadella's leadership Microsoft has seized upon opportunities to open source the .NET platform, build serious cross platform development tools and make them available free of charge while promoting the Azure cloud platform for independent development, even if it competes with them. Moreover, Microsoft is doing these things even though they arguably hurt the Windows and Office business in the short run because Nadella understands that Microsoft's future depends upon open source development and the cloud business, not the platforms of the past. Compare that with Larry Ellison of Oracle, who's still effectively in charge and is a contemporary of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. He was late to the cloud and his leadership of Oracle in recent years suggests an antiquated and unreformed view of the software industry that's stuck in the past while his competitors take a more modern view. Java has languished under Oracle and was made radioactive after the Google lawsuit. Ellison demonstrated that he was perfectly willing to burn any good will that Java still had in the open source community, making them pawns in his grand strategy legal attack against Google and Android. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they never sued anybody for making compatible or interoperable implementations of .NET languages or class libraries. Why continue as Larry Ellison's bitch when there are so many better alternatives to Java? It's a good question.
Let it go. Java had it's day in the sun during the .com era (no pun intended). It failed after Sun struck out bigtime on what could have been and the biggest thing in quite some time. .NET is taking over large scale stuff, and newer node.js, angular, and even Python for the small to medium projects. Java is outdated and Sun and then Oracle left it out to rot by not making native compilers and obsessing over making it work with Solaris and forcing developers not to do win32 only. Meanwhile Python for some reason doesn't have this problem.
It is legacy and a security risk and will never have a native look and feel and compiler. c# is what Java could have been and keeps getting innovations like Linq and generics (I might be outdated as I haven't touched Java in 10 years on generics). Let it die we have other newer things now.
http://saveie6.com/
Oh god! It would be so nice if people would do less cool new stuff! These days it feels like people barely know how to code. The end result is a "good enough" product that no one maintains. If there is a customer complaint, they patch it.
That's it. People work on "cool new stuff" and patches. No one seems to work on the stuff that people are actually using and is actually important.
The main problem with Scala is that it enables experienced Scala developers to write idiomatic code that's utterly indecipherable by anyone besides other, comparably-sophisticated Scala developers who've internalized that same idiom.
With Java, a less-experienced Java developer can still generally make sense of code that's above his skill level and eventually figure out how it works. With Scala, a less-experienced developer is just plain dead in the water because Scala allows *so much* to be implicitly defined by context & convention.
IntelliJ's Scala team is painfully aware of this. For years, they've been trying to mitigate Scala's problem at the IDE level by having the IDE sniff out code idioms defined by convention & context and display them semi-inline with the code itself. It helps, but in many cases it's more like fragile training wheels subject to breaking off at any time. And it makes Scala even more IDE-bound than Java... with Java, a good IDE is necessary for keeping sane & grunt-work automation... with Scala, it's an almost-essential part of deciphering code written by someone else *at all.* It's very hard to join a team of experienced Scala devs as an experienced Java developer and work efficiently alongside them... the Java-to-Scala learning curve is nowhere close to being as straightforward as most people initially think.
In short, Scala attempts to resolve Java's endless boilerplate code that needs an IDE for humans to manage efficiently with dense, idiomatic code that needs an IDE (doing de-facto realtime-decompilation & reverse-engineering) to be understood by humans.
With a good IDE, both meet somewhere near the middle of the "source readability" spectrum. My point is that Scala trades one major shortcoming (excessive boilerplate) for one that's approximately equal in magnitude, but opposite in details.
In theory, a good Scala developer can find a "happy middle path" that straightens up Java's boilerplate mess without becoming unreadable... but in the real world, Scala tends to just invert the old problem into an equally-bad new one.