Friday, May 01, 2009

Ruminations on what at Sun will stay and what will go

This week I ran into an old friend from Sun who now works at Oracle. I saw him in the lobby of the office building where I work at in San Francisco -- it turns out he's in the same office building! BEA had offices there, and now they're part of Oracle.

We went across the street to Peet's and remembered the good ol' days, and then started talking about the software products we thought were dead meat.

This is all conjecture and hearsay, and I recognize that every project killed means people unemployed, which is no fun as I can personally attest. But that said, one does wonder what's going to get the axe. Here are some possibilities

Glassfish
This is a hard one to swallow, but Oracle already has an app server (Weblogic). So there's a distinct possibility that Glassfish will have to go. Of course it's open source so it could still survive, but I can imagine Oracle pulling the app server folks off of Glassfish and onto Weblogic.

NetBeans
I love NetBeans. I had fun working on it. But let's get real. Oracle is already an Eclipse shop, as well as having their own IDE (JDeveloper). I just can't see why they'd want to keep NetBeans around

JavaFX
It's my opinion that Oracle has no need for this, and will be happy to pull resources off of it and back onto standard Java. However, mobile is taking off, and Java has a place there, so who knows. I am on the fence on this one.

JavaDB
I could see how Oracle would see this as quite valuable and how it could fill a good niche. But they could just as easily take the Most Excellent Java DB engineering team and redeploy them elsewhere, and leave Apache Derby to IBM.

MySQL
Well, everyone's conjecturing about this one. The nice thing for Oracle is now they have the future of MySQL in their hands and can direct it in a way that makes sense for their business. The only wild card I see is the forks that are out there, but I must admit I don't fully understand all the business and political aspects of this to know how viable these forks are if MySQL "proper" is put into mothballs.

There are lots of other ones to talk about - SPARC, cloud computing, and lots of little projects you probably haven't even heard of. But I don't have enough visibility into these to know what the right choice is or could be. So it would really be sticking a finger into the wind.

However, I know we'll be finding out soon enough. I don't envy those folks who get the ax because of the reorganizations Oracle will be doing. May each and every one of you who "get the package" quickly and easefully move on to your new phase in life, whether it's another job or time off or starting your own company. Good luck and God bless!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

NetBeans is a superior platform to JDevloper. JDevloepr is a fork of the old Borland JBuilder code. A code base that even it's original authors (Borland/Code Gear) abandoned in favor of Eclipse. If they keep projects based on engineering merit then Netbeans will replace JDevloper.

Anonymous said...

Keeping jdeveloper, possibly the weakest corporate sponsered IDE that exists for java would be foolish.

I like that oracle threw borland a bone, but its a terrible tool and part of an oracle "lock in" strategy to get people to foolishly use oracles "java" stored procedures.

Hopefully Oracle can do the growing up it needs to to play honestly in the "real" java community vs the fictional one it tried to create.

Not a big fan of NetBeans but Oracle would be crazy to kill it.

Anonymous said...

bottom line is: oracle should keep javafx and netbeans.
netbeans is much more productive than jdeveloper, and javafx is the future of java.
i hope oracle execs have some vision to see that

Dominique De Vito said...

Well, as I read your post, I have some doubts about why Oracle has spent so many billions while not to keeping (interesting) SUN's software stuff...