On a New Road

Oh, *obviously*, Oracle doesn't have a clue! But James and Johnathan did have a clue, and see how well it worked out for the entire company. SUN, remember it?

Posted by Bob on October 25, 2010 at 10:56 PM PDT #

I too am tired of all the ex-Sun managers who are whining, blaming Oracle, and forking Sun open source projects for their own profit. In all the chaos they have created, they have cast a gloom on Sun technologies by splitting the communities behind them and causing confusion by claiming they are the official open source community when they aren't! Oracle has kept those projects going and apparently is investing heavily as I suspect they are for Java. The java client issues have been a long time coming. I would hope that they are taking the time to fix the roadmap issues of the past. Dear ex-Sun management. Get a clue, plant your OWN trees!

Posted by 205.172.16.102 on October 25, 2010 at 11:47 PM PDT #

Whining? Internet muscles are funny. I think Mr. Gosling is passionately outspoken about a fantastic creation. Dagny Taggart and Howard Roark would've understood.

Posted by JC Mann on October 26, 2010 at 04:24 AM PDT #

Look forks, Oracle is killing MySQL. But the team responded to Oracle with pretty Maria. We are expecting SUN forks do the same. James, you looks great and young. Can you lead this with JCP and AFS for the sake of Java, please?

Posted by jose on October 26, 2010 at 11:19 PM PDT #

When i used to work for sun, i worked on a problem, that involved data corruptions, nobody could fathom why. i suggested a scheme where we write/read protect each os/kernel page used by oracle, so that when something &quot;unnatural&quot; happens, we'd know which sw/hw entity is responsible. the answer i received from oracle engineers was that the buffer records were touched in different places, not within a common buffer-access routine/function... so the idea was mooted... think about that ... buffer records are C structures (and oracle db server was written in C), but are touched and updated randomly... a lot was left desired about the sw engineering practices... after i left sun, i had to install oracle on a x86 server... the install wizard hung, and nothing worked ... and i did not know how much was installed vs not-installed ... after googling to no avail, i went through the install scripts and found that, some key env variables were set to an oracle engineer's home dir .. /net/<some_user> ... some much time later after reading scripts and correcting, i got the oracle instance to boot .. again, this bespokes volumes about the engineering practices... code reviews ... and before that, ARC (architectural sw/hw reviews ?) how could release engineering have not caught this ... or did they just not care ... unhappily and unfortunately, the companies that i've worked for, who cared are no longer around ... ingres, sun ... James G is telling us what he's witnessed and what he could not in good engineer's conscience, be an accomplice with... if oracle is different, i suspect he'd want to stay and make a difference ... he is not without DB knowledge ...

Posted by sam on October 27, 2010 at 07:19 AM PDT #

James, Tyvm for your immense contribution to my life and career, Java. I have really admired your pragmatism and high quality engineering focus all these years. I'm taking your advice. I generated a blog post about my new plans: http://goo.gl/U4xe or http://chaotic3quilibrium.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/how-oracles-ellison-drove-a-java-advocate-to-netc/ So, thank you again for so dramatically influencing the future of software engineering.

Posted by Jim OFlaherty on October 27, 2010 at 01:24 PM PDT #

Look i have suggested this times without number, and the recent action of Apple only served to overemphasize an already obvious point. Java will continue to be treated as the unwanted visitor by the other platforms until there exists a bootable java-implemented platform that can host the jvm. Only then, other platforms will learn to treat java with the respect that it truly deserve. Right now, the mood is like even if we try to bullshit java on our platform, what will they do afterall. JNode, maxine, guest vm....whatever takes java closer to the metal, that is the way.

Posted by new Color(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f); on October 28, 2010 at 12:51 AM PDT #

Hi James, this reminds me of good old javaOne and jbfOne days: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/10/10-shot_gatling_t-shirt_cannon.html Cheers Mat

Posted by Matthias Schorer on October 29, 2010 at 06:33 AM PDT #

I'm an enterprise professional and have seriously invested a significant amount of my professional life and my personal time (i.e. more than a decade of my life) to the platform, language and everything you could do with Java. For several years, I literally could do anything I needed. I thought I'd never regret investing in the magic that was Java. I never thought anyone could ever be. From academics to commercial work, from cutting-edge research to server-side business apps, from mobile medical apps to embedded code, Java has become the true language for me, for the professionals, the researchers, the hands-on hobbyists and everyone who wanted to program and - more importantly - deliver. No, I didn't need to buy a particular hardware for it. No I didn't even have to pay for an IDE. No I didn't even need to care whether my client would be running Ubuntu or NT. I didn't need anyone's permission to learn, write or deploy code. I could do image processing, write workflows, call esoteric services and almost everything I could think of. When the platform lacked a new or essential function, Apache was my friend. Countless, nameless people like me, some eminent, with their open source libraries, their hacks, wrote good, consistent code and we were ready for anything. Aside from the usual SE and EE features we all know that set the standard and we take for granted, Java was there for others too. DSP, calling MIDI instruments, image processing, etc... Sure it wasn't the fastest, but it was always good enough. You just coded in Java and it was what everything else wasn't or couldn't. In my line of work, it literally unified everyone and everything. We wrote it once, and it just ran. We shared code and syntax that everyone understood and liked. At sales, we showed off our mobile apps, our world-class web solutions, without regrets. No, Java didn't have built-in support for lambda functions and maybe it required boilerplate code if you haven't had a decent IDE to start with, but I could have hashmaps the size of Texas and had consistent state across several clusters and it all made sense. I never needed to learn a single aspect of Cocoa or MFC or HFS; in order to achieve an objective, it was just there, consistent and it all worked. I wrote for the desktop, I wrote for the web, I wrote for plethora of devices and mostly I wrote enterprise applications that is running around the world today. Java was, and still is, way ahead of its time; it effectively and acutely solved several major problems in this industry. I think it has been magic that Java and we collectively reached this far and wide against all odds. For years, it solved real-world problems and our concerns were already thought-out and externalised, and thoroughly addressed in several different ways, as it should be. How can anyone want to go back, move away from unification that was Java and split the development community further, and force us move back into uncertain commercial silos that plagued this industry decades ago? I don't know whether Java was or ever will be profitable for the one who owned its licenses; I don't know even if it needs to be. What matters is that it ultimately created an environment like no other. The industry and a lot of people have grown with it and are attached to it for all the right reasons. To us it's just like Math. It doesn't belong to the mercy of the corporations, it belongs to humanity. It just works and I don't understand the minds who wish to hinder its progress. I never thought we would be facing these non-problems; in particular, I can't see why we need to move away, backwards and not further. Me and my fellows face difficult choices due to this. Credible people talk as if we need to reinvest elsewhere and become platform or vendor specific developers. There is ongoing pressure about this and such comments and uncertainty is hurting us. This has happened before but now the fundamentals and the future of the platform and the language is questioned. This hurts. Most of us continue to work putting together enterprise solutions for IBM, Oracle and SAP using Java. We're not the ones who left Java for C# ten years ago, we wished the .Net guys well in writing for Microsoft products. We had a good look at AIR and feel that ActionScript 3 is also Java-friendly but really nowhere near it, and see that Adobe will need several more years to replicate what Java has already done in the past. We hope and wish them well. We look at our relatives and our children like Scala, Groovy and the like and wish them well too. We look at GWT, Android and the familiarity makes us feel at home and most of us find shelter in Google's commercial and benevolent aspirations outside the enterprise-owned domain. Outside the realm of Java, we feel alienated with ugly syntax and things that are inconsistent. Most of us dislike Objective-C and the trouble that is Xcode. We patiently watch and wait Mono and MonoLight repeating what Java has been before. As developers, we can't face going all exclusive Apple or Microsoft or Oracle or Adobe and not all of them together. Though we too wish well anyone who can easily quit and like anything other than Java. Considering the recent negative energy and the announcements that concern Java, I don't believe leaving Java for iOS/Ruby/C# or other development environment for developers is any more certain or better than continue investing in Java's future. I don't believe Java's future should be at the hands of one or two commercial organisations which rightly focus on their profitability first. The state and future of Java is ours. I believe Java must and only be open and free, and the Java should demand the same respect and international funding as the likes of Apache/Mozilla Foundation because of its purpose and service to humanity. Java is part of software community, sure, but it is also an example of cooperation and unity across different realms, so it has been an achievement of this generation that needs to stay. For once in software engineering, we have robots on the floor that operates on programs written in the same language as music players; web sites running the same server-side language and swanky touch-phones running on the same technology, and more. I can't tell you how amazing it has been and it still is. Though I sure can tell you how much of a loss it will be if we stop thinking in these terms. So let's please focus all our efforts in keeping Java independent, free and unhindered; and staying clear off bad vibes and negative publicity can only help. Thank you.

Posted by Scriptam on October 30, 2010 at 10:27 AM PDT #