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
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I was able to meet up with Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, as he was prepping for the fifth annual EclipseCon, which runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif.
I snagged a few minutes with Milinkovich on Friday to talk about the event, but our discussion wandered to the annual Eclipse Release Train. It's not due until June, but Milinkovich is already excited about the sixth annual synchronized launch of multiple Eclipse projects.
"Eclipse is an open source community, and we take what people contribute, so a big part of the release train is serendipity," Milinkovich said. "But this is shaping up to be a perfect storm of glad tidings for Java developers from Eclipse."
This year's release train, dubbed Indigo, is shaping up to an interesting and potentially important release for Java jocks, largely because of three projects: the WindowBuilder Java GUI designer, newly contributed by Google; the latest developments from the eGit team, which is providing support for the popular Git version control system; and improved integration of Apache Maven project build manager.
Milinkovich is also hoping for new editing features for Java 7's new language extensions in Indigo. "That one is pretty aggressive," he said. "So we're crossing our fingers and toes."
He's also expecting to include a project, dubbed Runtime Packaging (RTP), which aims to build a single, downloadable, installable Eclipse package that pulls together the various bits and pieces of the Eclipse Runtime technology stack -- things like Equinox, Virgo, Jetty and Gemini. Milinkovich mentioned versions of this package for Linus and the Amazon cloud.
"You'll be able to consume the Eclipse Runtime stack with a lot more ease," Milinkovich said.
The current list of Indigo projects is posted here. It's a whopper.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 23, 20110 comments
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was in the Bay Area last week ahead of this week's EclipseCon Conference to attend the first ever Orion Planning Summit. The event brought together a range of interested parties and companies who gathered in Palo Alto, Calif. last Thursday and Friday to establish the scope and roadmap of Eclipse's nascent Orion project.
Introduced in January, the Orion Project seeks to define a platform for building and integrating Web development tools. The project summary describes it as a "browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the Web, in the Web."
"For a major part of the development world, this idea of being able to develop in the Web for the Web is the future," Milinkovich told me. "There's a lot interest in seeing if an open community can repeat the success Eclipse had in this new area."
"In the Web, for the Web" is more than just a buzz-phrase, Milinkovich insisted.
"It means zero-footprint deployment, run-in-the-browser support for the major browsers on the client side, a highly scalable hosting platform for development in the long term, and in the very long term the ability to enable to some quite cool code, team, and project analytics," he said.
It's definitely early days for the Orion Project. The original code contribution -- a modest one from IBM -- just showed up in late December, and the project is still in the pre-proposal stage. But Milinkovich hopes that getting people involved in the project early will lead to a more diverse community of developers.
"If you go back ten years ago, when Eclipse was first launched, the code base that was put into open source by IBM was pretty complete," he said. "It has been a challenge ever since to build a diverse development team around the core Eclipse platform. We have a lot of diversity across the Eclipse Community, but within the platform itself, it's still largely the team from IBM. With Orion, we're consciously trying to start off with just enough code to be interesting, with the goal of getting people to jump in and start participating, making contributions, and creating a much more diverse development team right from the very beginning."
This week's launch of OrionHub should help.
Gartner analyst Mark Driver sees a lot of potential in this "ground up" approach to developing the Orion community. In his January 19 blog post, he wrote that it could create "a potentially stronger community commitment and uptake than we saw with Eclipse."
If the turnout for the summit is any indication, the project is off to a good start. The event was hosted by SAP, and people from large and small companies well-known in the Web development communities showed up, including RIM, Mozilla, Nokia, Microsoft, PhoneGap and github, among others.
The early release of Orion is currently available for download here.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20111 comments
The fifth annual EclipseCon Conference, which starts today and runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., promises to be a humdinger.
The marquee keynote at this year's event is the much anticipated David Gondek talk, "What Is Watson?" Watson, for those who don't have all the time in the world to watch TV (or read newspapers), was the system that beat two Jeopardy champs. Gondek is a research scientist on the DeepQA/Watson Project, and he promises to provide "a tour of the technologies that power Watson."
Mark Reinhold and John Duimovich's keynote, "The Java Renaissance," promises to be interesting. Reinhold is chief architect of the Java Platform group at Oracle, and Duimovich is Java CTO and distinguished engineer at IBM. Big Blue and Big O joined forces in October to make the OpenJDK project the premiere location for open source Java development from the two companies, so it's a fitting duo. I'm wondering if anyone will take offense at the notion of a Java "renaissance," which means "rebirth."
There's also an OpenJDK panel following the keynote. The panel includes Reinhold and Duimovich, plus Milinkovich and Oracle's Adam Messinger.
Cloudera software engineer Todd Lipcon is offering an intro to Apache Hadoop. Tons of interest these days in this Java-based open-source framework for data-intensive distributed computing, so I'd expect a big crowd. A committer on the project, Lipcon promises an introduction to Hadoop that covers the motivation for the system, the Hadoop ecosystem, the overall architecture, and the programming paradigms used to express scalable and flexible computation on large datasets.
This year's event is also hosting the fifth annual OSGi Devcon event. The co-located conference runs March 21 through 24 is open to all EclipseCon attendees. This is widely considered to be the premier OSGi developers' event, and features four days of talks, tutorials, and presentations for OSGi beginner and experienced OSGi developers. Look for sessions on OSGi and the cloud, software complexity, open source, massive device deployment, new tools, and nuts-and-bolts how-tos.
Of course, there will be lots of vendor announcements at the event. Here are a few to watch for:
- Compuware is showcasing its new Workbench product. Workbench is an open environment for managing mainframe app development through an Eclipse GUI. It also provides a common framework and single-launch point to initiate Compuware’s mainframe products and other mainframe and distributed products.
- Genuitec is demoing “OneInstall,” which the company bills as a one-click, cross-platform installation technology designed to allow developers to deliver their apps to end-users, and manage updates on the user desktop. This is a direct competitor with InstallAnywhere and InstallShield, and worth a look.
- AccuRev. will be announcing updated integration of its software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution with Eclipse at the show. The Eclipse Plug-in for AccuRev is designed to provide out-of-the-box integration between AccuRev and the Eclipse IDE platform.
- I also got a cryptic email from Juniper Networks about news expected at the show about its Junos SDK and Junos Space SDK. The Junos SDK is designed to enables developers to "innovate on top of Junos and Juniper Networks platforms." The Junos Space SDK is aimed at developers building and deploying network-aware applications.
- Finally, a company called itemis , an independent IT-consulting company and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, has created an EclipseCon 2011 app. Peter Friese, Heiko Behrens, Ekke Gentz, and Christian Campo developed the app, which runs on any phone with a Web browser. It lets you browse the schedule, mark your favorites, create your own personalized conference schedule, see photos of the presenters, and refer to maps of the venue and Santa Clara. It's downloadable from the EclipseCon Web site.
Watch this site for more coverage of the show.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 21, 20111 comments
Unless you were coding under a rock this week, you probably heard that Java's progenitor James Gosling held forth at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas on the state of Java under Oracle. His comments were widely reported, including this one posted on TheServerSide.com:
"It's in [Oracle's] own self-interest to not be really aggressively stupid. But it's been clear that it's been something of a learning experience. It's been clear that they didn’t understand what they bought, what it meant to deal with communities and people and all the arguing and discussion and consensus building that’s involved in communities."
Receiving less press was a keynote by Steve Harris, Senior VP of Oracle's Application Server Development Group, and Adam Messinger, VP or the Oracle Fusion Middleware Group. The title of their talk was "Java in Flux: Utopia or Deuteronopia?"
Notwithstanding the unexpected coolness factor of using the title of an episode of the "Aeon Flux" anime series, or the many trips to a dictionary it undoubtedly triggered, Harris and Messinger covered well-trod territory: We've made some mistakes…we're sticking to our roadmap…converging the JRockit and Hotspot JVMs is a priority…look at all we've done with JDK7… we're working on Lambda…Java EE needs to be tenant-aware and service-enabled to support the cloud…Java ME is still important…we love the Java community, etc.
But here's the thing: Harris and Messinger are in the belly of the beast, so to speak, managing an awful lot of Java activities at Big O, so shouldn't the press be paying closer attention to what they're saying?
Harris joined Oracle in 1997 to manage development of the Java virtual machine for the Oracle8i release. He's the guy who called Java "the crown jewel" of the Sun acquisition. Messinger manages Oracle Coherence, JRockit, WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. He lists his job on his LinkedIn profile as "Hacker."
"Oracle has a tradition of saying a few things and sticking by then, in contrast to Sun who was much more open," Messinger told conference attendees, according to TheServerSide. "We laid out the Java roadmap and are executing on it, and we hope that speaks to our commitment."
"Developers are restless, they want cloud functionality from their own IT department" Harris added. "With the cloud, the scope of problem has expanded to include the data center itself, with multiple tenants. To move forward, existing APIs in Java EE need to be updated to be tenant-aware, service-enabled, and EE needs to support various styles of deployment. The goal is to get all that done in Java EE 8."
Please note that I'm not implying that you shouldn't be following Gosling's activities. If you're not following his blog, NightHacks, you should be. But he's a big presence, literally and figuratively, and he shouldn't overshadow the current crew of Java stewards. Be sure to keep Harris and Messinger on your radar.
We certainly will.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 18, 20110 comments
The ballots are in, and Oracle's development proposal for Java EE7 has been approved by the Executive Committee of the JCP. The vote was unanimous, with only one company (IBM) even commenting.
The sponsors of Java Specification Request (JSR) #342, the umbrella JSR under which Java EE 7 will be developed, literally cited the cloud as the "theme" for this release.
"The Java EE platform is already well suited for cloud environments thanks to its container-based model and the abstraction of resource access it entails," the spec request reads in part. "In this release we aim to further enhance the suitability of the Java EE platform for cloud environments. As a result, Java EE 7 products will be able to more easily operate on private or public clouds and deliver their functionality as a service with support for features such as multi-tenancy and elasticity (horizontal scaling). Applications written for Java EE 7 will be better able to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud environment."
But Gartner analyst Mark Driver, who specializes in application development technologies and open-source software, says making Java EE 7 Java's point of entry into the cloud is a bad idea.
"Just as you can't tweak a mainframe app to go client server, or a client server app to go Web, you can't just tweak a web app to go cloud," he told me recently. "It requires some fundamental changes."
The sponsors of JSR #342 disagree: "Since its inception, Java EE has offered a managed environment in which access to the system and any external resources, such as relational databases, is controlled and mediated by containers. This container-based model has allowed portable applications to target single-machine deployments as well as large cluster installations without fundamental changes to the programming model. We see the cloud as a further evolution of this paradigm and propose to address it via some incremental changes to the existing (and popular) Java EE programming model."
"That evolutionary step may introduce such dramatic changes to the DNA of Java that it implodes," Driver argues. "And the focus is so heavily on maintaining backward compatibility and stability for Oracle's current user base that they're heading down a dead-end road. We need an entirely new specification around a Java Cloud Edition."
The cloud-focus of Java EE 7 emphasizes multi-tenancy, application versioning, and support for non-relational data stores. Big Blue's comment pointed out that the next release of Java EE should provide the basis for modular Java capabilities in the next version of the Java Standard Edition (Java SE 8). Modularity, of course, is needed to support a move to the cloud.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 16, 20111 comments