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Kai Wähner (Twitter: @KaiWaehner, Blog: www.kai-waehner.de/blog) is an IT-Consultant in the Java EE, SOA, Cloud Computing and Big Data world. In his real life, he lives in Erlangen, Germany and works for Talend (www.talend.com). Besides solving huge integration problems for large companies, Kai writes articles for magazines and speaks at international IT conferences such as JavaOne. Feel free to contact him via Twitter, LinkedIn or Email. Kai is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 38 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Oracle complains about Sun’s Java-Release-Cycles - OpenJDK will become more important

04.13.2011
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Oracle complains about Sun’s Java-Release-Cycles

A keynote of Dalibor Topic (Oracle) criticizes the Java-Release-Cycles of Sun Microsystems at the Java conference „CONFESS 2011“ in Vienna, Austria. After showing the past of Java SE from version 1 to 6, he showed a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) named „Java SWOT – Sun days“ (Picture from my Tweet). One weakness stated the slow release cycle of Java SE. Oracle will do a better job in the future, beginning with Java 7 in 2011 and Java 8 in 2012. Further releases (Java 9 and so on) also seem to be in planning stage already. Java shall remain the most used language!

 

OpenJDK will become more important  for Oracle than it was for Sun

However, a strength of Sun was the large Java community. Oracle recognized its bad name in the Java community as it was stated in the „Java SWOT - Oracle“, which followed Sun’s SWOT analysis. Oracle will re-connect to the community in the future. An important statement of the talk is related to the OpenJDK: „ I think, Open JDK will become more important for Oracle than it was for Sun.“ Therefore, JRockit content will be merged to OpenJDK. The JDK / JRE will still be free in the future, and contain the same license as before. Of course, Oracle will offer premium services such as JFR, JRMC, JFB or support.

 

Trends for Oracle: Multi Core, Dynamic Languages, DSLs, Cloud and Mobiles

At the end, Dalibor Topic showed which trends will be important in the Java / JVM environment for Oracle in the next years: Multi core processors, dynamic langugages, domain specific languages, cloud computing, smart phones and tablets. No surprise after all

My conclusion: The critique about the slow Java-Release-Cycles is true. The plan of Oracle for the future of Java sounds good! What do you think?

 

Best regards,

Kai Wähner (Twitter: @KaiWaehner)

 

[Content from my Blog: „Oracle complains about Sun’s Java-Release-Cycles“ – Kai Wähner’s IT-Blog]

Published at DZone with permission of Kai Wähner, author and DZone MVB.

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)

Comments

Christian Schli... replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 2:47am

No focus on the desktop? Then its finally time to leave the party...

Andries Spies replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 3:33am

The Hudson debacle, Open Solaris, and MySQL: I would not call those "disconnect from the Java community", rather actively sabotaging community driven projects.

cowwoc replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 8:06am

I agree. Oracle seems to be focusing all its energy on the latest fads instead of fixing well-recognized shortcomings of the Java platform. In that way, they are even worse than Sun ever was.

 

I'm tired of companies introducing half-baked technologies and then abandoning them as soon as a new fad comes around the corner. If you're going to do something, do it right. Oracle's first step should be to upgrade the Java bug database to a first-class citizen. There is too much one-way communication where Java is concerned.

Wai Ho replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 8:52am

It is the role of companies like Oracle to constantly be on the cutting edge. Even though the vast majority of enterprise applications end up (after failing on the web, because of the web's inherent defects, resulting in the realisation that the web is a total failure for practically all real time and mission critical applications), even today, on the Java desktop, the current trend is for everyone and everything to TRY to be on the web.

So, that's what Oracle is focusing on. Even though, of course, they should be focusing on the desktop because that is where enterprises are actually found. Maybe Oracle will come around to realising where its customers (e.g., banks) are ACTUALLY found ( as opposed to SUPPOSEDLY ). In that case, they'll need a framework for developing Java (because there's no other way to create Windows/Mac/Unix apps) desktop (i.e., Swing/JavaFX) applications. They'll need a framework that provides predefined components. A framework that lets you develop in your domain right away. Hopefully they'll discover that they already have a framework that does PRECISELY that.

 

Andy Leung replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 10:53am in response to: Wai Ho

They do, it's called NetBeans Platform. But I agree with you on some points where Oracle should focus on how to make NBP better because it's powerful but not user-friendly enough. In order to build a simple app with some modules where users can use (e.g. something like jDownloader), it requires 1000000000 steps to simply add all the required modules before building your own module. And the API is simply not easy to follow. Like this:

Lookup.Result result = Lookup.getDefault ().lookup (new Lookup.Template(TipsOfTheDayProvider.class));
Collection c = result.allInstances ();
Collections.shuffle (c);
TipsOfTheDayProvider selected = (TipsOfTheDayProvider)c.iterator ().next ();


even if I look at Lookup, I have to look at so many different things to just get the collection shuffled. Other than that, NBP has everything you need for desktop app. If you really like GDC, you should also like NBP because it has all these background thread features where they are optimized for your app/module to simply leverage them.

Wai Ho replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 11:39am

There's no NetBeans Platform tutorial anywhere that uses Lookup.Template. So maybe you're not using the tutorials, which would explain your confusion. Agree, of course, with your assertion that NBP has everything needed for desktop apps (i.e., real world, as opposed to toy web apps).

Andy Leung replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 12:15pm in response to: Wai Ho

Sorry I am confused with your first and second sentence, it seems to me they are contradicting but I guess I get your point. Anyhow, Geertjan Wielenga's tutorials are always the best ones to start with. Except that I can't find any other good tutorials that providing more complex examples or in-depth purpose and usage of each API. Like I said, the platform itself is extremely powerful. If you know how to trim it down to what you need in configurations, you can build something that starts up in seconds, very responsive, and leveraging all your system resources to achieve what you want to do (if you design it the way it effectively uses memory and multi-core).

Carlos Hoces replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 3:41pm

Wai, that example above has been taken from the Lookup API Javadoc, as seen here:

http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/index.html

BTW, there is great amount of shared knowlegde here:

http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeansDeveloperFAQ

other than the inmmense Geertjan blog. Not to mention the always busy and helpful dev mailing list, where anyone may find quick and quite often precise answers to any doubt.

The lack of "official tutorials" doesn't seem to bother too much to anyone willing to dig into NetBeans Platform.

Hannah Myeres replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 4:54pm

Lack of official tutorials? There seem to be dozens, maybe hundreds:

http://netbeans.org/kb/trails/platform.html

 

Carlos Hoces replied on Wed, 2011/04/13 - 5:48pm

You got trapped into my "quoted irony", I guess! :)

Andy Leung replied on Thu, 2011/04/14 - 8:32am in response to: Carlos Hoces

Thanks Carlos, I went through all these sites already. However, like I mentioned, there are not as many good tutorials as other JEE ones on the net, but also the API itself is designed in a complicated way. Perhaps that's just me and I guess I am sure about it :)

Gar Labs replied on Sun, 2011/10/23 - 9:58am

Swot analysis is an important tool that businesses use to know its strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. With this kind of tool, all angles are covered and policies may be generated from this analysis. - GAR Labs

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