Josh Fruhlinger's blog

Java: Too big to fail?

2009-11-19T23:14:03-05:00

If you're worked up over the post-merger future of the Java platform, you owe it to yourself to read Peter Wayner's longish piece on this very Web site! It is quite soothing, and you can imagine it being read aloud in the calm, ration voice of a public radio announcer. The thesis goes something like this: Java could be wrecked by Oracle heavy-handedness driving wedges between it and other big companies with big Java stakes, and it could be supplanted by other, hotter and noisier, languages. But it probably won't, because of inertia! Well, OK, "inertia" sounds bad; let's say because of a huge pool of happy Java developers, and a huge number of installed JVMs, which are really doing just fine for most things people use them for. I quibble with some of his details -- I particularly doubt that even the biggest, most lumbering company would pay "$100, $200, or even $1 million per CPU to avoid recoding their Java EE applications" -- but in general I think he's right: Java is here to stay because you can't just turn it off, and if it gets screwed up everyone would suffer.

This is not exactly the stuff of enthusiasm building! I got my very first real job in 1999 as a copy editor for the group that was putting JavaWorld out in those days, and the technology had buzz then -- certainly more than some of our other publications, like SunWorld (which focused on Solaris) and Windows TechEdge (which was for NT admins, whee!). Java was innovative, weird, and was going to take over the world, maybe. Now it's everywhere, like everyone dreamed. If there are no more worlds left to conquer, well, it's big enough that it won't go away any time soon, either.

And who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? The much-desired advent of closures in Java 7 may be on the horizon! So, despite the grumpiness that often comes to the fore in this blog, I do believe that Java has a steady future, that may even feature some excitement now and then.

Android just reproducing Java ME's problems, now

2009-11-17T12:03:18-05:00

Is Android a Java platform? It's certainly Java-esque, in the sense that for the most part you write apps for it in Java code. But it's not blessed by Sun or tested for compatibility -- in fact, it's incompatible with standard Java in several specified ways; its VM isn't an official JVM; and, to make things wackier, the Java it's based on is Java SE, not Java ME. This drives folks like Hinkmond Wong, Sun's Java ME blogger, crazy. But you can make a decent argument that the sorry, fragmented state of Java ME brought made Android inevitable. With its crazy quilt of different implementations on various handsets and OSes, Java ME was never going to be the platform for the next generation of desktop-quality apps; a new platform was necessary to help Java code take over the mobile world.

Except! It turns out that Android is hitting all the same fragmentation problems as Java ME, and in record time! Not only are there three different versions of the Android OS out in the wild at the moment, but different handset manufacturers customize the platform and add their own specialized ROMs, with the result that code that runs on one phone completely borks out on another.

You can say a lot of negative stuff about how Apple handles the iPhone -- their arbitrary rejection of apps based on content is particularly egregious. But I think that their basic model, in which they tightly control the both the OS and the hardware, is boon for developers. It may be that the only way to have a platform that is truly standardized is to have one company in charge of it. Microsoft was essentially able to impose a more-or-less standard x86 platform spec on PC manufacturers by the sheer power of its monopoly, but nobody has ever managed to do the same for cell phones. Android was supposed to be developers' great hope, but it may be another sign that a truly interoperable platform can't be built by multiple companies with competing agendas. And that's something that ought to interest Java developers, whether they care about cell phones or not.

SAP CTO tries to liberate Java with hilariously self-aggrandizing blog post

2009-11-12T16:04:56-05:00

Oh, I'm sorry, have you been bored by the Sun-Oracle merger drama because it's been all about MySQL and Java has been reduced to a baffled bystander? Well, get ready for some ancillary Java-related corporate drama that has the added benefit of being pretty hysterical!

It seems that the Wall Street Journal in a recent editorial noted that SAP had sent a letter to Oracle proposing some sort of meet-up between the companies' leaders; the WSJ speculated that this was in essence an offer on the part of SAP (which is based in Germany) to intervene with EU regulators on behalf of the troubled Sun-Oracle merger. Well, that certainly came as surprise to SAP! According to the company, the letter was actually a request that Oracle keep Java open, or perhaps even open it further; Oracle never actually replied to the missive, but did leak an out-of-context paragraph from it to the Journal to make it look like SAP was trying to help the merger along.

No doubt partly in response to all this, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka put up a blog post covering what I assume is the same ground covered in SAP's letter to Oracle. The opening paragraphs hit points that I think many people, particularly those not affiliated with Sun or Oracle, would agree with: Java ought to be more open, the JVM ought to be open source, and the Java Community Process ought to be under the control of an outside foundation, like Eclipse is. For extra burn, he even finds a 2007 quote from Oracle's representative on the JCP to this effect.

But then his next quote is from Mikhail Gorbachev. Because he finishes up the blog post memorializing the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, and claims that in making his triumphant call for Java liberty, he is the moral equivalent of Ronald Reagan demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Wall. This is, to put it mildly, overstating things. Still, it's nice to know that Java can elicit such passion, you know?

The EU objects

2009-11-10T20:29:36-05:00

As predicted by everybody, the EU has issued a formal objection to the Oracle-Sun merger. In particular, the European Commission worries that Oracle will hold back on MySQL development, presumably to prevent the open source database from becoming a rival to Oracle's much pricier high-end offerings. While you may have a knee-jerk reaction to this to the effect that "Oh, MySQL is open source, if Oracle doesn't advance it someone else will," note that almost all MySQL development comes in-house, not from outside developers.

Of relevance is that the same can and has been said for Java; thus, it's relevant that, according to the New York Times article I linked to above, the EU's antitrust attention was originally focused on how Oracle's acquisition would affect Java. And to be sure one might speculate on ways Oracle could direct Java to aid its own projects and irritate its competitors; still, the potential clash in the database market is obviously easier to get one's mind around.

EU regulators apparently have a much keener interest in open source than their American counterparts, so it's not too crazy that they're sniffing around these specific areas. (Also relevant, of course, is that MySQL is in origin a European project.) The upshot of the EU's focus on MySQL is that, if the merger passes (and the smart money still thinks it will), then Oracle's intentions for Java will not have gotten strong regulatory scrutiny, and won't necessarily be the subject of any promises from Oracle.

The merger drama continues

2009-11-06T03:19:37-05:00

Some people just don't have much patience! For instance, the big news in the snack food world this month was that Utz and Snyder's of Hanover were going to merge -- except then the two companies called it off, citing the protracted review process that they had to endure. The total time they were held in limbo by regulators? 15 days.

By contrast, Oracle and Sun have endured regulatory delays for months now, and it looks like the merger won't clear until January at the earliest. And scuttlebutt has it that the European Commission will be raising some sort of formal objection to the process, which Oracle would have to address. And many clearly pro-Oracle anonymous sources quoted in this story say that Oracle will unleash a war if that happens, calling on allies in the U.S. government -- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose San Francisco district is just a few miles from the headquarters of both companies -- to put pressure on the Europeans on behalf of the merger.

If the merger doesn't happen, the consequences are probably pretty dire for Sun; Oracle would lose face pretty publicly, but wouldn't be in a terrible position, as Sun would be back to its previous status as a rival, and much weakened. In all probability, the company would end up shedding most of its business piecemeal, and Oracle could snap up the bits it wanted at a discount -- all the bits other than MySQL, anyway, as that's the sticking point for the Europeans.

Which leads to the question of how important Java is to this whole thing after all. I at least have been working on the assumption that Java is what Oracle is really after in this whole adventure; but if that's so, why is it so grimly refusing to consider leaving MySQL out of the equation, even if that puts the whole transaction in jeopardy? Is MySQL the real prize after all? Or does Oracle's macho attitude mean that no compromises are possible once a course has been set?

Oracle: Your Java-related products are going to be fine, just fine

2009-11-03T02:24:18-05:00

Hey, Java fan, are you still anxious about the fate of future Java-related technologies after the Oracle takeover? Well, fear not, because Oracle has put an updated FAQ on the subject! They actually discuss two of the products people have been most agitated about -- GlassFish and NetBeans -- by name, with varying degrees of reassuringness. The mentions are actually short enough to reproduce here in full. First, on the GlassFish EE server:

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

Translation: GlassFish is kind of necessary as a reference implementation for Java EE, so we'll be keeping that around. When it comes to the commercial offering, we'll still sell it for a while as we figure out if any of its components are better than their analogues in WebLogic. Eventually we hope to sell some kind of Frankenstein combination of the best bits of the two.

And what of NetBeans?

Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle's strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle's next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.

Translation: We'll still host the NetBeans project on our servers, and certainly won't try to stop anyone from using it! Just give us a call when you want to do serious work, and we'll get you set up with JDeveloper.

Reassuring, right? Oracle also pledges to keep developing OpenOffice, which is relevant because it has a lot of Java dependencies, but mostly I just want to mention that the FAQ section on OpenOffice declares that "OpenOffice is expected to create a compelling desktop integration bridge for our enterprise customers," which is a hilarious statement that I have no idea what it means.

This, of course, assumes that the merger is still on! Right now Sun stock is trading at $8.25, which is a good 13 percent less than Oracle's $9.50-a-share offer. In other words, investors aren't entirely convinced Oracle will be able to close the deal, or that it will pay the full promised price if it does.

Java Store limps to daylight

2009-10-29T14:32:50-04:00

While we all wait for the Sun-Oracle merger to wind its way to a close (by January, maybe?), let's pause to acknowledge what should be kind of big Java news: the advent of the Java Store, which should be open to shoppers "in the next week or so"! And if you're wondering about the selection, know that the number of apps on the shelves is already ... approaching 50!

OK, forgive me for stifling a bit of laughter. In my other blogging life, I cover Apple, and of course the iPhone App Store counts its offerings in the tens of thousands. This is an unfair comparison -- the App Store is more mature, obviously -- but the Java Store strikes me as a fairly obvious copycat service, so I think it's sort of inevitable.

Of more fundamental concern is just what the point of the Java Store is. The App Store economic equation goes something like this: Having lots of bits of specialized functionality makes the iPhone platform more attractive, and rather than writing all those Apps themselves, Apple is happy to provide a marketplace simple enough to provide economic incentive for programmers to do the work for them. Apple takes its cut, of course, but that revenue isn't really the main purpose, and pales in comparison to the gobs of cash the company makes selling the phones (phones which, keep in mind, are easier to sell because "there's an app for that").

But what sort of money-making activities is the Java Store supposed to prompt? The Java runtime is free to end users, so more downloads don't profit Sun (despite the fact that the company routinely trumpets the number of JRE downloads as relating to its health somehow). If the store's a success (big if), it could provide an incentive to get more people writing Java apps, but again, why? Is that going to sell more Sun servers or Oracle all-in-one enterprise appliances?

If there is something potentially profitable here, it's the possibility of mobile sales -- remember, Sun does charge (and turn a profit from) Java ME licensing on handsets. It's important to note that the Java Store has two parts -- the Store, which is the front end, and the Warehouse, which is where all the apps are stored and organized. My guess is that Sun is hoping that the Warehouse will be attractive as a ready-made backend for carriers who want to launch their own App Stores on their handsets (particularly their not-quite-smartphones). That's a real potential moneymaker for Java -- a shocker, I know! We'll see if it takes off.

Java speaking for itself

2009-10-28T00:54:51-04:00

In the light of the delayed Sun-Oracle merger (and see the New York Times Dealbook blog for a brutal analysis of how the deal was structured to put Sun in a poor position in case of just such delays), there's been a lot of anxiety about Java's future. With the companies unable to really comment on future plans, of course, this has led to anxious seizing on any little tidbit to guide the way.

Take, for instance, this anxious piece from Bert Ertman. Ertman went to Oracle OpenWorld and saw attention being lavished on Sun's hardware and on Solaris and MySQL (despite the trouble the latter has caused) as future components of seamless Oracle appliances. He's seized on a gnomic line from Larry Ellison -- "Java speaks for itself" -- as indicating that Java will get short shift.

I think he's probably right in his speculation that Oracle sees Java as a "product" from Sun that it can take advantage of. But maybe we should wait until we see how this plays out before we start really panicking.

The Sun-Oracle merger is going great!

2009-10-22T22:59:59-04:00

So in case you've (a) been under a rock and (b) have difficulty recognizing sarcasm, that headline is sarcastic. The Oracle-Sun merger is, in fact, not going well. Let's review all the ways it didn't go well this week!

The sticking point is MySQL, which is no doubt extra frustrating to folks who mainly care about the health of Java. MySQL creator Monty Widenius, who parted company with Sun in February of this year, had initially seemed to take a sort of standoffish, we-can-always-fork-it attitude about the takeover, but now he's come out against it.
Also against it: the dangerous hippie double team of Ralph Nader (because of fears that Oracle will hobble MySQL) and Richard Stallman (for the same reasons, plus brain-hurtingly complicated things about the various versions of the GPL).
Oracle, apparently finally figuring out that it needs to do some damage control, sent company president Safra Katz to Europe to make nice with EU Competition Commissioner "Steelie" Neelie Kroes. Kroes was in no mood, and, according to her spokesperson, "expressed her disappointment that Oracle failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or a proposal for a remedy to the competition concerns identified by the commission."

As to who is behind all this (because yes, there's always someone behind things, don't you know), opinions differ! The juiciest rumors: Groklaw's PJ hints darkly at Microsoft's involvement, while Maureen O'Gara thinks a crooked IBM exec might be involved. (PJ and O'Gara were on opposing sides in the long-running SCO-Linux drama, accusing each other of secretly shilling for IBM and Microsoft, respectively, so this is hilariously apt.)

Much fun as it is to sit back with some popcorn and enjoy the craziness, there are of course real consequences as the uncertainty drags on. Sun announced that it would be laying off another 3,000 workers -- 10 percent of its workforce. At this rate, will there be anything left of Sun for Oracle to buy?

Spring: Simple getting complicated?

2009-10-20T11:26:16-04:00

It's no secret that large, unwieldy products tend to get larger and less wieldy over time. It's not anybody's fault, really; it's just that large, unwieldy products have huge user bases, all of whom use it for somewhat different things, all of whom pay good money for it, all of whom want their needs met and their use cases improved. Then one day everyone wakes up and realizes the thing is a mess, and start looking for something easier to use.

That, more or less, is what happened to Java Enterprise Edition, which led, among other things, to the advent of the Spring Framework. Now Spring itself is evolving to add new features and please more customers with its 3.0 release; will this kill some of the simplicity that made it so popular in the first place.

A lot of the new features sound like they'd be quite appealing -- REST capabilities! Streamlined Spring bean configuration! Shortcut annotation! But the thing that really jumps out at me is the introduction of Spring expression language (SpEL). Yes, I know that in general Spring precludes the use of the endless XML configuration files required by Java EE; but I think once you've introduced your own expression language, things are starting to get kind of gnarly.

But maybe I'm wrong! What's your expectation for Spring Framework 3.0?

Oracle will be dogfooding it when it comes to Java

2009-10-15T01:09:06-04:00

"Dogfooding" is a verb that derives from the phrase "eat your own dog food" -- which, in IT circles, means using the products you sell internally. A rather famous example was Microsoft's moves to shift the infrastructure behind its Hotmail service from BSD to Windows servers.

Sun can be said to eat its own dog food to a certain extent when it comes to software. The Glassfish application server is, for instance, largely written in Java. Yet despite Java's huge prominence, the fact is that Sun isn't a software company (as James Gosling wisecracked earlier this week at Oracle OpenWorld). Java hasn't necessarily been the core ingredient to all those pricey servers that have actually been making money for Sun (despite what the deliberate branding confusion would imply).

Oracle by contrast, just made a huge bet on Java, basing its upcoming line of Fusion middleware on the platform. This is the stuff the next level up the stack from the database that is the next frontier of Oracle's moneymaking schemes, and it's tremendously important to them. I'd bet that half the reason they bought Sun was not because they necessarily wanted to control Java, but because they were terrified of what would happen if IBM did.

But they do control it now, and the interesting part is that this turns the dog food metaphor on its head. Oracle isn't eating its own dog food to prove to the other dogs that the dog food is tasty; rather, it became so dependent on the dog food that it bought the dog food factory. The next logical step, of course, is to make the dog food taste the way Oracle wants it to taste. And what does that mean for the other dogs?

Oracle is going to be so nice to Java! (Plus: An escape plan)

2009-10-13T20:42:33-04:00

Oracle used the opportunity of its recent OpenWorld conference to proclaim that it has nothing but good things in mind for Sun once the EU finally relents and allows the merger to go through. Some highlights:

Larry Ellison proclaimed that he would pour more money into Sun's products than Sun had, though he mostly focused on Solaris and SPARC. Scott McNealy proclaimed that Oracle's existing use of Java "speaks for itself" -- but at the same time noted that, if Oracle really botched things, Java's GPL'd status would mean that it could always be forked. This is somewhat disingenuous -- Oracle would retain the rights to the Java brand, and moving the enormous installed base to a platform with another name, even if it had much the same codebase, would be an epic struggle -- but it was interesting to me that it was floated at all. It certainly strikes me as a non-reassuring reassurance, even if it was just meant to point out that Oracle was aware of their need to treat Java well.
James Gosling promoted NetBeans and Glassfish, while admitting that he had no idea whether NetBeans and Glassfish would survive absorption into the Oracle product line, which already has its own application servers and IDEs, thank you very much. Gosling also cheekily noted that he was looking forward to working for Oracle because "I have never worked in a software company before, so it will be an adventure."
At least one attendee remarked on the cultural contrast between JavaOne and OpenWorld: more suits, fewer body piercings; more smartphones, fewer people hanging out to check mail or surf at public terminals; and no beanbags for relaxing on in spare moments.

Oracle OpenWorld developer track promises to be super awkward!

2009-10-08T15:05:56-04:00

To hear The Register tell it, Sun execs were very much taken aback by the spanner thrown into the Sun-Oracle merger works, thus extending the twilight period in which Sun spins its wheels waiting to be absorbed into Oracle and the products it sells and develops to be integrated into Oracle's roadmap. Presumably, when father of Java James Gosling was scheduled to give the keynote at Oracle Develop next week, it was assumed that he'd be an Oracle employee by then. Instead, he'll still be talking as a sort of emissary from another company -- one that legally can't talk too much about the direction of the post merger company, even if that's exactly what everyone is interested in. At best, his talk -- "The Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Software at Sun" -- will serve to convince Oracle developers that the work put into the merger will be worth it.

There's an extra layer of potential awkwardness if the Register's rumormongering is true, because it may be that the annual JavaOne developer conference is slated to be spiked once the merger has been completed, replaced in the future by an extended Java presence at Oracle OpenWorld. Over at JavaLobby, this rumor has elicited a host of encomiums for what had been Sun's landmark conference. Among much sighing and hand-wringing over the great dynamic at previous JavaOne shows comes this cogent observation from Eugene Ciurana: Oracle OpenWorld "is not a developers conference; it's an IT conference. It's focused on business and other topics that have little to do with development. JavaOne is a nuts-and-bolts affair first, an engineers conference, a place where the élite and the newbies meet for a frank and fun exchange of ideas and experiences." And what more evidence of this do you need than the layout of the current OpenWorld? Here's the first line of that blog post from Sun lined to above about Java's presence there:

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 begins on Sunday, October 11, and continues until October 15 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. Oracle Develop, a premier developer conference for Oracle technologists sponsored by Sun Microsystems, takes place from October 11 to 13 at the nearby San Francisco Hilton.

The San Francisco Hilton is a good-sized place, but it's definitely a sideline to the enormous convention center at Moscone -- which is, as it happens, where JavaOne traditionally takes (took) place.

Flash also threatening to be written once, run everywhere

2009-10-06T01:00:41-04:00

At the Adobe MAX conference/dog-and-pony show, Adobe revealed with much fanfare Flash Player 10.1. Why should this be of interest to the world of Java? Well, once 10.1 becomes something other than vapor sometime in 2010, it will run not only on desktop browsers, but on most major smartphones as well. And we're not talking about some sort of stripped-down mobile version; Flash 10.1 will be full-on flash, running on palm-sized devices.

Sound familiar? It's the old write once, run anywhere dream of Java, one that never quite came to fruition when it came to mobile devices, with Java ME being just different enough from desktop Java to preclude real synergy. In fact, Flash and Java, though they have wildly different origins, have quite a bit in common, both being essentially cross-platform runtimes. Flash has virtually no presence in the lucrative server niche that Java carved out for itself during the dot-com era, but the now-ubiquitous Flash browser plug-in, which provides animation and simple applications to virtually everyone with a Web browser, is more or less what the initial vision of Java was in the mid-1990s. And Flash has always done a better job of integrating itself into the Web browser experience, and thus making itself a more transparent part of the Internet, than Java.

Java's attempt at a comeback in this space is JavaFX, which will have a mobile version as well that will supposedly be much closer to the desktop edition. But with a huge number of Flash developers already in the field, it may be a battle already lost. If Flash Player 10.1 ends up on millions of smartphones while JavaFX is still finding its bearings, it may end up with unsurmountable advantage. Even Adobe's big miss in this space -- it's inability to convince Apple to allow a Flash plug-in on the iPhone -- isn't good news for Java, as the coveted phone is no more willing to accept a JVM.

Java isn't dead -- it's just fossilizing

2009-10-02T00:11:44-04:00

So here's a thing that everyone thought was going to be in Java 7 and now isn't -- the Swing Application Framework (which in January I called a JSR to watch in 2009, whoops). Work on it hasn't progressed, now it's being pushed back to Java 8 maybe, etc. It wasn't really a core bit of the language, though it would have given heart to those worried that Sun was done with Swing.

But there's a larger sense that big fixes and changes aren't being added to the language any more, closures being the big one that seems to have such an intense following. In a smart and provocative blog post, Chas Emerick says that you should learn to love the new, more stable Java language. I won't rehash his arguments in depth here, but he basically says that Java is now a systems language, like C; making big changes to it would be counterproductive, because all the action is taking place in the JVM languages built on top of it. Java actually needs to be stable, because without being able to depend on such stability, folks wouldn't take the time to invest in work on those languages. By becoming necessary, Java ceases to be interesting.