Jelastic Hires 'Father of Java' Gosling and Brazil's Souza

James Gosling, whom we all know as the Father of Java, and Brazilian Java community leader  Bruno F. Souza, whom the community knows as "the Brazilian Javaman," have joined the platform development advisory team of  Java/PHP Platform-as-a-Service provider Jelastic, the company announced this week.

Gosling will join as an independent director, and Souza  will become an official advisor.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jelastic, which was founded in 2010 by Hivetext, a Zhytomyr, Ukraine-based startup focused on Java application development in the cloud, bills itself as the only cloud company whose underlying platform is Java, and CEO Ruslan Synytsky says having such prominent Java figures contributing their expertise will give the company "even more in-depth coverage and analysis of Java features on our always transforming and improving platform."

Gosling and Souza are the most recent additions to the company's growing list of advisors. Jelastic first announced the creation of an advisory group to help with the development of its PaaS product in 2011. That group currently includes Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of the PHP language); Mark Zbikowski (former Microsoft Architect); Serguei Beloussov (Parallels founder); Monty Widenius (founder of MySQL and MariaDB); Igor Sysoev (founder of NGINX); and David Blevins (founder of a Apache TomEE, OpenEJB, and Geronimo).

Without a doubt, this is a big "get" for Jelastic. Gosling, a former Fellow at Sun Microsystems, is credited with inventing the Java programming language in 1994 (though Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Sun product manager Kim Polese gets the credit for naming it). Gosling briefly joined Oracle after the database giant acquired Sun in 2010, left to work at Google for a while, and now serves as chief software architect at Liquid Robotics, a very cool company that makes "autonomous, ocean going platforms," including the Wave Glider, which is used for research.

Souza is a former president of SouJava, a Brazil-based Java User Group (JUG), and was one of the initiators of the Apache Harmony project to create a non-proprietary Java virtual machine. SouJava filled the vacancy left by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) on the Java Community Process Executive Committee (EC) in 2011. That vacancy, readers will recall, was created when the ASF's decided to quit the EC. The non-profit organization behind more than 100 open-source projects had been threatening to leave the organization for some time. When the JCP executive committee voted to approve Java SE 7, which the ASF opposed, the group walked.

The São Paulo-based SouJava was the first JUG to join the JCP, and it claims tens of thousands members, for which it hosts activities in several cities around the country.Souza represented the organization on the EC. Souza is also a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and an outspoken proponent of open source.

 Souza gushed about Jelastic in a statement: "Throughout my career, I have been promoting freedom and choice for developers," he said. "Jelastic has a unique business model, that promotes choice. Jelastic philosophy changed the way I look into cloud infrastructure. Jelastic's Java-based implementation shows the power of Java technology. Giving developers the freedom to leave gives us the confidence to choice to stay. This is the power of the Java ecosystem. The power of choice. I'm very happy to be more directly involved in the future of Jelastic. This is an amazing opportunity to help bring more freedom and choice for developers worldwide."

 Jelastic gushed about their newest advisors, promising to use their souped up advisory group over the next year "to influence Java development to make it even more dynamic, by eventually implementing the ability to reload all configurations/settings such as Xmx on the fly, without the need to restart an application/JVM, to bring/adapt desktop applications to the cloud."

 And Gosling, who, in my experience, is not given to gushing, came pretty close in his statement: "Configuring cloud infrastructures is fun the first time you do it. But it doesn't take too long before it becomes a tedious time sink," said James Gosling. "And, if you have the misfortune of being a software developer that has to fight it out with an IT organization, who usually wants consistency, control and visibility, you find that you're always fighting with them. Jelastic solves all of that. Easy configuration tools for developers, management tools for IT. Peace and productivity. I love it."

Posted by John K. Waters on November 19, 2014