When I heard that Oracle would be proposing the Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation, a few things struck me: 1) Oracle is getting better at dancing back from stepped-on toes in lively open source communities; 2) This is the very move IBM made when it created the Eclipse Foundation; and, 3) What will this move mean for the Jenkins fork?
During the first few years of the Foundation's existence, virtually all of my conversations with executive director Mike Milinkovich included a question about "demonstrating its independence" from IBM. I asked him if he thought Oracle's move would effectively satisfy concerns about Oracle's stewardship and perceived control of the Hudson project.
"Absolutely," he told me in an e-mail. "By the time the project is officially created, the 'Hudson' trademark will be the legal property of the Eclipse Foundation. The Hudson project will be a diverse, community-led project running under the Eclipse community’s development and IP processes and rules. Actions speak louder than words, and those are some pretty tangible actions."
Several companies are going to be providing development resources for an Eclipse-based Hudson project, including Sonatype, Tasktop and VMware. VMware's participation in particular will be a boost to the project, says Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype, because of the SpringSource connection. (VMware owns SpringSource.)
"Many users of Hudson work in the enterprise Java space so an endorsement and provisioning of resources for the Hudson project by SpringSource is a huge vote of confidence," he said.
As for the Jenkins fork, "If this move had happened some months ago, it may have prevented [it]," Milinkovich said. "But at this point it's safe to assume that the split will remain. I am as interested as anyone to see how this will all play out."
Oracle's announcement likely came as a surprise to the Jenkins community. Oracle kept an unusually tight lid on this announcement. (I had to pinky swear to keep it under my hat until this morning to get an early briefing.) The Eclipse Foundation's director of marketing, Ian Skerrett, even tweeted an apology to @jenkinsci: "If anyone in the Jenkins community has questions about Eclipse feel free to contact me; sorry for your morning surprise."
IDC analyst Al Hilwa noted that the Jenkins community seemed to have been operating under the assumption that Oracle "was going to do some bad things with the code," and overreacted when they created the fork. "It may be time to come together again under one code base, now that it's under the Eclipse foundation," he said.
UPDATE: Hudson creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi just posted his reaction to the news today on his blog. He said the news was "quite a surprise," and added:
"[On the] one hand, I think this definitely shows the great success of the Jenkins project post divorce…. Were it not for the success of Jenkins, they wouldn’t be giving up the project…. But at the same time, I just wish Oracle saw that coming a few months earlier, while we were still seeking the middle ground. We were very interested in having the trademark moved under the custody of a neutral third party, but they were very clear that that’s not acceptable to them. And it also disappoints me that they decided not to reach out to the Jenkins community about this move, but I guess they are never really interested in working with us."
I asked Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and founder of Eclipse Mylyn, what he thought this move would do for users of the popular CI tool and the growing population of plugin makers.
"For users the answer is straightforward," he said, "as Eclipse is a clear go-to place for enterprise-ready open source tools. For plug-in makers… Eclipse has very clear and hardened guidelines on APIs, which provide a significant benefit to any growing plug-in ecosystem. However, a key reason for the success of Hudson was a rapid pace of innovation in the plug-in ecosystem, which has, in part, come from Hudson’s permissive approach to committer rights." "
"The rate of innovation that comes from this kind of freedom of evolution will need to be combined with the API hardening needed by enterprise consumers," he continued. "Eclipse’s endorsement of GitHub as an extension of the Eclipse contribution ecosystem is one mechanism that could help combine the best of both worlds."
Posted by John K. Waters on May 4, 20110 comments
If you haven't been following the evolution of the Jease open-source content management system (CMS), you should. The now two-year-old project was conceived to solve some of the problems developers face when building database-driven Web applications with Java.
Jease (an abbreviation of "Java with Ease") started out as a basic CMS framework with no "system" pretentions. Back in early 2010, project founder Maik Jablonski declared his simple aim to create a framework that makes it easy for Web devs to create custom content structures (FAQs, special Web site content sections). And he built the framework on top of three open source technologies: the db4o object-oriented database, the Apache Lucene information retrieval library, and the ZK Ajax Web application framework. Jease now also supports McObject's Perst OO embedded database.
Since then, the project has bloomed with an expanded mission to create a full-blown CMS, while honoring its keep-it-simple roots. The project is evolving fast: Version 1.7 was released in February, and 1.8 was released in March.
Version 2.0, which was released this week, represents a "big leap" toward turning the Jease framework into a true CMS, Jablonski says.
"The main theme for the 2.0 release line is to continue the journey from a developer-oriented Content-Management-Framework to a user-friendly Content-Management-System which tries to make publishing in the Internet as easy as possible," he wrote in in a blog post announcing the release. "Nevertheless, Jease targets Java Web developers who want to things getting done without headaches."
The latest release adds a number of features and capabilities to the evolving CMS, including instant preview, a link checker, a redirect service, translation capabilities, and instant relocation handling of moved and/or renamed content. A full list of new features and bug fixes in Jease 2.0 is available on Jease.org.
Jease 2.0 is available under the GNU General Public License V3. There's a nice demo available here. Keep in mind that, though jease.org runs on the Apache Tomcat servlet container, this demo is runs on Jetty.
Posted on April 28, 20110 comments
Zend Technologies and Rightscale announced this week a jointly-developed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) architecture for PHP developers. The announcement was kind of overshadowed by the big VMware PaaS news, but this is a dynamic duo you should keep an eye on.
Zend, of course, is the Cupertino, Calif.-based creator and commercial maintainer of the PHP dynamic scripting language. Zend is run by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who are key contributors to PHP and the creators of the core PHP scripting engine. RightScale is a Santa Barbara-based provider of an automated, Web-based (and eponymous) cloud management platform.
The heart of RightScale's management platform is a set of pre-built ServerTemplates for common server configurations. "It's a way to assemble a machine configuration out of building blocks," RightScale's CTO and co-founder Dr. Thorsten von Eicken explained to me last year, when his company first partnered with Zend to release a set of RightScale ServerTemplates for deploying Apache with PHP. Working together, the two companies made it possible to deploy Zend-based PHP apps across multiple clouds via the RightScale management platform.
Now they've released the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack, which is designed to provide massive scalability and high availability for PHP apps running in the cloud. The solution combines the RightScale management platform with the Zend Server Web app server.
Rightscale CEO and co-founder Michael Crandel told me that the new product was a direct response to customer demand.
"We've seen a real movement toward platform-as-a-service and ease-of-use for developers, who really don't want to mess with these ugly things called servers and storage volumes, but just want to upload their code and run it," Crandel said.
"Both companies wanted to create a PHP PaaS, with the characteristic elasticity of a cloud platform, but also one that would be customizable," said Kent Mitchell, Zend's director of product management. "We've combined the best practices of Zend with the best practices of RightScale to create a reference PHP architecture that you can launch basically the push of a button."
A big selling point for this solution is likely to be its flexibility -- Mitchell calls it "open PaaS" or "customizable PaaS." A platform for PHP from Zend's perspective, he said, shouldn't be tied to single cloud provider, should be application-centric, and should handle the app whole lifecycle.
"If a customer wants to move from Amazon to Rackspace, they should be able to do that," he said. "And as we move forward, people aren't going to be monitoring servers anymore; they're going to be monitoring applications. They'll want to know things like, I'm having a problem with my e-commerce application, not that server XYZ is heavily loaded. And though lots of PaaS companies handle just the deployment or test or just one part of the lifecycle, we believe that it's important to the full lifecycle: development tooling, test and QA, staging, and production deployment."
"Because of the way RightScale works, and the way Zend is very flexible," Mitchell added, "what we've got here is a solution that's a PaaS, where you can sort of lift the hood of the car, tweak the engine a little bit if you want, slam the hood back down, and now you've got your PaaS. If you don't like MySQL as the database and you want to use, say, Oracle, you just lift the hood, pull out MySQL and put in Oracle, and close the hood. Now every developer that fires it up will start with an Oracle instance."
The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack comes with a bunch of tools and features, including a production-ready, cloud-based environment that includes the Zend Server, the Zend Server Cluster Manager, and RightScale's Premium Onboarding, which is a step-by-step path to deploying on the cloud using best practices from the two companies.
Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk, contributed a comment for the press release that I thought was worth passing on: "Considering PHP's ubiquity on the web, it wasn't a question of if it embraced the cloud, but when," he said. "With the recently announced RightScale/Zend partnership, the two companies are offering PHP users the best of both worlds, with the time to market of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the flexibility of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)."
More details about the solution pack are available on the Web site, where you can also sign up for an intro Webinar scheduled for April 28 at 11:00 am PDT.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 21, 20110 comments
VMware has launched an open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product, which my colleague Michael Domingo reported on last week. The Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization vendor is billing its new Cloud Foundry as the industry's first open PaaS offering, a "new generation of application platform, architected specifically for cloud computing environments." Cloud Foundry is available as a cloud service operated by VMware, but also as a downloadable VM called "Micro Cloud." It's still in beta, but the source code for the project is available now on http://cloudfoundry.org/.
I heard from several people about this beta release. IDC analyst Al Hilwa, who was in Las Vegas covering the MIX11 event when the news broke, was the first to fire off an e-mail.
"Here is an infrastructure player that understands the value of application platforms and has moved to systematically assemble a cloud stack through smart acquisitions," Hilwa said. "While we have heard similar announcements from VMware a couple of times before, this one looks like the real thing."
It's "the real thing," Hilwa believes, because VMware is finally ready to put the platform into the hands of developers to play with, and plans to release the entire stack in open source "for anyone to leverage."
"While VMware's offering will be competing with Microsoft Azure, it will more directly compete for Java workloads with RedHat," he added. "VMware has set itself the ambitious goal of providing a choice of frameworks so that apps can be ported from different worlds [e.g. Java with Spring, Ruby on Rails, etc.]. This is an ambitious approach, and we should watch VMware to see if it's able to add more and more frameworks quickly enough, or generate the open source traction, to bring others into the fold."
Cloud Foundry is an important strategic move that positions VMware as "another emerging pole for Java developers," Hilwa says.
"We are living in disruptive times," Hilwa said. "And it's at exactly at times like these that players move into adjacent businesses and try to change the game. VMware clearly hopes to do that for PaaS platforms."
I also got a heads up from the indefatigable Liz Clinkenberg Christina Dalit about blog postings from the SpringSource crew on the news. It's been about 20 months since VMware acquired the chief commercial sponsor of the open source Spring Framework project. And it's still a surprisingly vocal group.
Rod Johnson, SVP and GM of VMware's SpringSource product division (and founder of SpringSource), posted what started out as a slightly canned-sounding statement about the news, but went on to offer a nice diagram of the Cloud Foundry model. He also observed: "To date, there hasn't been a strong, open PaaS destination for Java. The millions of Java developers have largely been left to fend for themselves in the cloud, with weaker options than have been available, to, say, Ruby developers. We're changing that."
He also encouraged developers to sign up for a beta account here, to download the source code and get involved in the project.
SpringSource team member Peter Ledbrook does a good job of explaining how Grails and Cloud Foundry work together on his blog "One Step Deployment with Grails and Cloud Foundry." Team member James Tyrrell talks about the integration of Cloud Foundry and Spring Roo on his blog "Roo + Cloud Foundry = Productivity in the Cloud." Great posts.
Cisco Cloud Evangelist Brian Gracely makes a stab at providing "101 Thoughts about the 'Cloud Foundry' Announcement" on his JavaLobby blog. I didn't count them, but I think he gets pretty close.
VMware has published a useful FAQ page, and you'll find video on YouTube on the CloudFoundry Channel. I liked the video by Jerry Chen, senior director of VMware's Application Platforms group, but there are others, and I'd expect more to come for a while, so you might want to subscribe.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 18, 20111 comments
What's the first big-enterprise name that pops into your head when you hear "Java community" these days? Oracle, of course, but also IBM, and lately Apple. How about Red Hat?
Red Hat doesn't always get recognized for its efforts to move Java forward. And frankly, they're kinda tired of going unnoticed.
"We often don't get the credit we're due when it comes to moving Java forward," Rich Sharples, director of product management in Red Hat's Application Platforms group, told me the other day. "Red Hat is a very active contributor to all things Java. We're the largest contributor to the OpenJDK, outside of Oracle itself. And for the last couple of releases -- Java EE 5 and Java EE 6 -- we played it pivotal role in making Java EE a much more accessible and product platform for developers."
As of today, you can add Java EE 7 to that list: Red Hat has submitted three new Java Specification Requests (JSRs) for the upcoming Java EE 7 (JSR 342). The new JSRs were submitted to create standards for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and cloud deployments, Sharples explained. As the press release announcing the JSRs put it, they offer Java EE 7 users "a new consistency, flexibility," and "portability across on-premise and cloud environments, and they reflect Java EE's position as one of the most flexible and adaptable application platforms in the market."
Red Hat was responsible for the Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) spec in Java EE 6 (JSR 299), so it's not surprising see CDI 1.1 heading its list of proposed JSRs for Java EE 7. The purpose of JSR 299 was to unify the JSF managed bean component model with the EJB component model, creating a significantly simplified programming model for web-based applications. CDI 1.1 goes on to simplify and unify various layers of a Java EE application with a standard model for Dependency Injection and lifecycle management. The components are allowed to interact in a loosely coupled way, and the developer can build even simpler, more easily maintainable, and more portable apps without having to introduce non-standard, proprietary frameworks.
CDI was the brainchild of JBoss Fellow Gavin King, has become the standard for dependency injection for Java EE. The spec, formerly known as Web Beans, grew out of an open source project called Seam, an application framework on Java EE 5, which he also created.
The company is also proposing a specification for distributed data grids, which Sharples claims will allow easier and more cost-effective scaling for the data-tier, which is essential for large-scale cloud or utility computing and multi-tenant application platforms.
The third proposed JSR -- Bean Validation -- is described by the company as a means of providing "a consistent approach to implementing validation logic throughout an application, from the persistence layer to the presentation layer. The unified approach helps avoid duplication and inconsistencies, ultimately resulting in speedier development."
The new specs aren't actually JSRs yet; they still have to go through several stages within the Java Community Process. From the initial JSR Review stage, in which Red Hat's proposed specs will be evaluated and approved by the Executive Committee (EC), they will move into the Early Draft Review stage, the Public Review stage, the Proposed Final Draft stage, then Final Release, and finally Maintenance. Along the way, they could be voted down by the EC, withdrawn by the spec leads, or rendered "inactive," the fate of JSRs that have posted neither a Final Release nor a JCP milestone draft for the last 18 months.
I don't blame Red Hat for blowing its own horn about its role in the evolution of Java. The company has served on the EC, and it has been a Java spec leader or Expert Working Group member for more than 35 JSRs. The first Context and Dependency Injection spec -- SR 299 -- had a big impact on Java EE 6. The company was behind Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3, JavaServer Faces, and the Java Persistence API. And it's currently is collaborating on four existing JSRs for Java EE 7: Java API for RESTful Web Services 2.0 (JSR-339); Java Message Service 2.0 (JSR-343), Java Server Faces 2.2 (JSR-344), and Java Content Repository API (JSR-333).
"I think most developers understand Red Hat's role in moving Java EE forward," Sharples said. "Our approach to delivering new technology, rather than the ivory-tower, closed-door, designed-by-committee approaches some of these other organizations take, we're on the ground, so to speak. And we do get credit from the developer community, but we certainly don't get noticed by the mainstream press."
No one would ever call me mainstream, but in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, my hat's off to Red Hat.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 14, 20110 comments
We reported last week the release of a new version of a free and open source testing tool for iOS apps called FoneMonkey from a company called Gorilla Logic. The Broomfield, CO-based company was founded by a group of former Sun Microsystems execs in 2002 as a software services firm specializing in rich Internet applications (RIAs) and enterprise app development with Java, Adobe Flex and mobile platforms.
I had a chance last week to chat with Stu Stern, the company's president and CEO.
"We're not focused on any particular vertical," Stern told me. "We're a bunch of hard-core geeks here, so the real focus is the technology."
That bunch includes Stern, who ran the Sun Java Center, Sun's global Java professional services organization; VP of engineering Ed Schwarz, who founded the global e-Business consulting organization at Sun; and CFO Hank Harris, who directed Sun's Professional Services group, which was responsible for telecom accounts in North America.
It's not surprising that the company was initially very Java focused. But tracking trends in the industry over the last eight years led the operation into RIA development in general and Flex development in particular, for both enterprise and mobile markets. (The Flex SDK was designed for developing and deploying cross-platform RIAs based on the Flash platform.)
"One of the big deficiencies we've seen in the RIA space is automated testing support," Stern said. "We're pretty serious about Agile around here, and we believe that automated testing is critical to Agile development -- we don't see how you can do refactoring of an application if you don't have an automated test to back you up."
FlexMonkey was the company's first response to these observations. It's a free Adobe AIR application designed to record, playback, and verify Flex UI interactions. The tool also generates ActionScript-based testing scripts that can be included within a continuous integration environment.
Last year "the Gorillas" turned their attention to the iPhone, where, Stern said, the need was even more acute. "In the Flex space most of the tools were oriented toward QA specifically, and weren't well suited to the type of testing that developers do," he said. "That's what drove the development of that tool. FoneMonkey follows that same philosophy of tools that can certainly be used by QA, but are very, very well-suited to developers."
Stern is the creator of FlexMonkey and FoneMonkey, as well as a tool called Fexmonkium, a free plugin for the Selenium integrated development environment that adds FlexMonkey recording and playback functionality.
"Even though we have these testing tools, we're not a testing company, per se," Stern said. "We're very much an app development firm. The majority of the work we do is just building things for people. And the tools have come out of our needs doing that work. And we're not just a Flex and iPhone shop. We do Android, and of course, lots of Java. We're pretty much right-tool-for-the-job kinds of guys. We're not religious about any particular technology."
Stern is scheduled to lead a session at the 360 Flex Conference, underway this week at the Marriott Denver South in Colorado (April 10-11). As the name implies, the event is for Adobe Flex developers, (rumors of the death of which have been greatly exaggerated). Stern's session is called "Automating Functional Testing." He plans to talk about how a "core suite of automated functional tests" provides a solid foundation for rapidly iterating product releases "by ensuring [that] the introduction of each new feature doesn't inadvertently break pre-existing functionality," the website promo states.
I'm guessing FlexMonkey will come up in the discussion.
Given his company's investment in Flex tools, I wondered whether Stern was concerned about the apparent rise of HTML5 over Flash.
"We're not worried, first, because we're not betting the company on it," he said. "I do think Steve Jobs did a great job of spreading FUD when he wrote the infamous letter [declaring that Apple would not support Flash in Apple's mobile products]. After that letter went out, people started asking us about HTML5. But HTML5 is not really an answer to Flex. At this point in time it's an answer to Flash video -- you've got good H.265 video support in HTML5 -- but it's not a development platform for RIAs."
"We still love Flex," he added. "We just think Adobe/Macromedia nailed it in most respects in terms of making it easy to build a rich Internet application. And frankly, it doesn't seem like Apple is focused on the developer; some people around here believe that the company has downright disdain for developers. But ultimately, as hard core geeks, we don't really care. Confusion and complexity drive consulting."
And I had to ask about the future of Java under Oracle.
"Look, it's not like the future of Java is really in jeopardy at this point," Stern said. "Sun clearly dropped the ball on the user interface side (ironically, since that's where it all started), but Java still owns the backend. We are seeing some significant PHP back there, but for most hard-core back-end dev, it's still Java. And the tool support for Java is so so mature. It's an incredibly productive development platform. We think the preference for scripting languages we're all hearing about is overblown. We just don't see the leverage you get with something like Ruby."
Posted by John K. Waters on April 11, 20110 comments
The annual O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo hits the Hyatt Santa Clara in Santa Clara, California, next week (April 11-14). The annual gathering of the Dolphinistas (Dolphinarati? Dolphinators?) looks to be an exciting event. The list of keynoters includes former MySQL AB CEO Mårten Mickos, now CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company behind the open source cloud platform of the same name, and Michael "Monty" Widenius, the always intriguing author of the original version of MySQL and now project lead of MariaDB.
Meanwhile, at roughly the same time (April 10-14), about 2,500 miles away at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, organizers of the 2011 Collaborate Oracle Users Conference are hoping to attract their share of the MySQL community. In fact, this will be the first time they've been asked to participate.
I had a chance to talk with Andy Flower, the president of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), the database technology community for Oracle, which organizes the event. Flowers' day job is with Right Triangle Consulting, a Leawood, Kansas-based strategic information planning and architecture firm, where he serves as the managing director.
"Shortly after Oracle's acquisition of Sun, which included MySQL, we reached out to that community and said, Hey, we're a database community and you're a database community, and now we're all part of the Oracle community, so let's find ways to network and share and work together," he said. "Not only are we like-minded people in that we're data people, a lot of our members have MySQL in their shop, so our existing membership base has a keen interest in MySQL."
The Collaborate 11 keynote lineup will include several Oracle execs, including SVP Steve Miranda, SVP Wim Coekaerts, Senior Architect Tom Kyte, VP Mark Townsend and VP of MySQL Tomas Ulin. Mr. Ulin will be logging some mile next week, because he's also speaking at the O'Reilly event.
Outside the conference, the IOUG has created a MySQL Council. Flowers says the user group sought out some of the leading advocates of MySQL and invited them join the council. "We're trying to work with that community, to get a better understanding of them, and to find ways to help them integrate into the Oracle community."
Flowers says he understands that the open source MySQL community looks upon Oracle with skepticism, and his group is eager to help build a communication channel between the MySQL people within Oracle and those outside the company, so that the open source community stays vibrant and productive.
"We can help them to build effective communication between their community and Oracle," he said. "We've had 20 years' experience of working productively with Oracle, and we believe we can lend a hand there, too. If you really want to talk with someone inside Oracle about what they're doing with MySQL, this is the place to be."
Flowers hastened to add that the bulk of the event's content will come from within the user community outside Oracle.
Collaborate 11 will features more than 500 user-driven sessions, Flowers said, full of tips, techniques and best practices for Oracle Fusion Applications, the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's Agile, Oracle Hyperion Performance Management, Oracle's Siebel CRM, and Oracle's Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) product families.
Flowers allows that the O'Reilly conference is likely to pull in more of the open source contingent of the MySQL community, but he maintains that the IOUG event is drawing a share of the community that's interested in furthering their working relationships with Oracle.
"We're independent of Oracle," he says. "That's what the 'I' in IOUG stands for. We're not bought and paid for. We speak our minds. And that's always been a positive for the company and the community."
BTW: Flowers says that the timing of the conferences is just coincidental; they're scheduled far in advance.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 8, 20110 comments
James Gosling's blog was unavailable part of yesterday, I suspect because of the sudden spike in traffic he created on Monday when he posted the following: "I find myself starting employment at Google today."
Yes, Google got Gosling. The news was in dozens of headlines yesterday, and I was able to confirmed it late in the day via other sources, but I could get no details about what he will be doing there -- no job title, no department, nothing. Gosling said in his blog he does not know what he will be working on at Google, but he said that the job "looks like interesting fun with huge leverage."
RedMonk analyst Michael Cote wasn't surprised at all the tight lips. "I don't think it's that odd that they're not speaking to what he'll be working on," he told me. "Gosling is someone you would hire and sort it out later."
What does Google gain with Gosling?
"While he wasn't on 'the front line' of the Java world, I'd wager that Google is happy to stack more Java leaders into its ranks," Cote said. "As I recall, the two major languages at Google are Java and Python. Java is an important language for Google, and having 'The Father of Java' there is a nice thing to have."
Karen Padir, vice president of products and marketing at open source database vendor EnterpriseDB, sent me an e-mail opinion about the hire: "When I think of James, I am reminded of Sun Microsystems' core values: Integrity, Innovation, Courage and Transparency. It's not surprising that Scott McNealy's clan flocks to [those] that hold those same values. Google is very lucky to have James on board."
What is Gosling likely to be working on at Google?
Gartner's Mark Driver expects Gosling to take on some kind of "think tank" job at the Googleplex. "But maybe Google has plans for the next big thing beyond Java," he added. "Gosling would certainly grant them a tremendous amount of developer cred if that’s the case."
"I wouldn't be surprised if he continued to do research on Java, instead of getting glommed onto a specific product," Cote added. "He was doing a lot of research at Sun, last I heard."
And then there's the legal angle:
"On a tactical level, the pending and ongoing lawsuit between Oracle and Google over Java and Android makes Gosling's insights unique," observed Dana Gardner, principle analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "His input and guidance on the suit and Java technology in general is probably priceless."
IDC's Al Hilwa doubted that the hire was connected to the lawsuit. "As companies mature, they covet a position of thought leadership and mindshare," he said, "especially as they try to make gains in community relations. Having the founder of Java can be a feather in their cap with the Java community, and they are certainly positioning themselves as an alternative pole for this community."
Florian Mueller, the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign, and a relentless blogger on issues around Oracle claims against Google, was sanguine about the hire. "I believe [Gosling] is just another trophy recruitment for Google, like Vint Cerf and others before him," he said in an e-mail. "This hiring won't have any impact on the dispute between Oracle and Google because that case will be adjudicated purely on its merits.
So, what does Gosling get from a job at Google? (Besides a boatload of cash.) For one thing, Hilwa suggested, an environment that more closely resembles Sun's than Oracle's.
"It's just speculation, but Gosling may have assessed that he would be happier at Google, given a more free-form communication culture," he said. "For Google, not having to monetize its software R&D directly in enterprise licenses is a luxury. For companies that sell software licenses to enterprises like Oracle, it is more important to maintain a single point of communication around strategy and roadmaps because many of the deals can pivot on how focused and tightly articulated these are."
Stu Stern, one of a group of Sun Microsystems refugees behind a startup called Gorilla Logic, offered the most familial observation. "I always got the sense that James' heart was on the client-side, and certainly Android is by far the most successful expression ever of client-side Java," he said. "In any case, what die-hard geek could resist working for an innovation powerhouse like Google?"
Gosling's blog was back online this morning, and his comment thread had grown to 212 mostly positive responses. My favorite came from Vince, who posted on Monday: "So the guy who invented Java is working for the company that is being sued for using it? That's why they hired you, purely for the irony factor."
I don't know if it's ironic that the Father of Java will be roaming the Googleplex, but it's sure to be interesting fun… with huge leverage.
Posted on March 30, 20111 comments
Now let me get this straight: Java is not only safe in the bosom of Oracle, but better off because the company is accelerating innovation, which stalled under Sun. And the OpenJDK is the best way to make that innovation happen. And Oracle and IBM, though still fierce competitors, are committed to working together to protect their substantial investment in Java, so don't worry about that. And Big O's inherent interest in profits -- it's a company, after all -- does not make it the enemy of open source.
Okay. Got it. Can we please move on now?
Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Java platform group at Oracle, and IBM Distinguished Engineer (and Java CTO) John Duimovich spent about a quarter of their Wednesday keynote at the fifth annual EclipseCon Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., conveying this message. They did it with humor and self-deprecation, but it's time they stopped.
Just last week I was chastising my colleagues in the tech press for focusing on the Java Old Guard when they should be paying closer attention to the new regime. But if the new guys continue to lard their public communications with bland reassurances and prickly justifications, I might have to take it back.
"Oracle's number one priority for Java is to keep it number 1," Reinhold said.
"We want to make sure Java remains number 1," Duimovich said.
Still, we did get a look at their plans for Java. Duimovich said that IBM intends to contribute class libraries and take on the challenge of internationalization. But he also said that IBM is still figuring out how best to participate in the OpenJDK. The company doesn't just want to "just dump undocumented code on OpenJDK." He said Big Blue aims to "earn its way in" over the next year through its considered contributions.
"We're going to participate by improving OpenJDK with our years of experience in the code base," he said. "One at a time, our developers will get known, they'll earn commit rights, join groups, and participate in projects. We expect that to happen over the next year."
He added that IBM would continue to support customers with Harmony code. The company turned away from the Apache Software Foundation's effort to create a compatible, independent implementation of Java Standard Edition under the Apache License. "I don't have unlimited resources," Duimovich said. "That's how we think about it. It's a slight change in investment for us."
Reinhold promised that the OpenJDK would be open and transparent, though he admitted there was still work to be done "to finish the job we started in 2006," when the project was launched by Sun Microsystems.
They touched on Java 8, which is expected in late 2012. This will be the version that offers a more modular approach to Java, Reinhold said, including the ability to work with OSGi. Oracle is a serious backer of the OSGi-based modular approach to developing and deploying applications and libraries. The vehicle for modularization will be Project Jigsaw, an OpenJDK project that aims to design and implement a simple, low-level module system focused on modularizing the JDK.
We also got a hint of their thinking for Java 9. Duimovich wants to see support for massive multi-core processors, NUMA, multi-gigabyte heaps, multi-tenancy, and hypervisor integration. Reinhold's Java 9 wish list includes reification, tail calls, continuations, value classes, big data support, meta-object protocol, and data integration.
We should also expect more coordinated releases of IBM JDKs and Oracle JDKs, Reinhold said.
The title of the tag-team talk was "The Java Renaissance." Reinhold explained that Java is "coming out of a dark time." Adding: "The renaissance isn't just about Oracle. It's about Oracle working with existing partners Red Hat, IBM, and Apple to bring the same code base to more and more platforms."
Didn't the Borgias come to power during the Renaissance?
Posted by John K. Waters on March 25, 20110 comments