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How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

arstechnica.com

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Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#21

Post by Roboprog »

apo wrote: post #6

Is Java EE released under an open source license? The article only makes sense if the license is not open source, but this important detail appears to have been left out entirely. A few quick searches suggest Oracle is using some kind of free-as-in-beer license for Java EE. edit: buried in the middle of the article is this passage: > JCP concerns aside, rumblings over what's happening with Java EE have been much loud…

Pulling out of Java EE probably makes sense for them from a financial perspective. It's a huge codebase with god-awful complexity and a zillion legacy features. And, if it's not making any money, what do you tell your shareholders when they see the "maintain JEE" section of the quarterly budgets???

(the very size of this codebase might make it difficult for anybody to maintain)

That said, I suppose we shouldn't be shocked if Oracle gathers usage data, finds the 5% of the platform actually in common use, and creates a new (proprietary) server platform mostly compatible with the features that matter, for which you will pay dearly to have supported/patched.

Obviously, this move isn't good for anybody but Oracle, but they are not a charity, and can anyone say that JEE is not a bloated pile of mostly abandoned missteps with a few random nuggets of goodness?

I guess there's always "Sparkjava" (Sinatra/Express style) web platform for Java 8 :-) http://sparkjava.com/

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#22

Post by pjmlp »

noir_lord wrote: post #20
nightmiles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inertia of large enterprises makes Oracle largely immune to perceived bullying or negative reputation. While the "boots on the ground" developers may be displeased with how Oracle increases friction, project managers and directors are happy to continue renewing their contracts in order to keep their systems "supported." Oracle are shrugging their shoulders all the way to the bank.

> The inertia of large enterprises makes Oracle largely immune to perceived bullying or negative reputation. The inertia of current large enterprises using Oracle sure, if the cost to move from Oracle is very large then they'll accept the risk if they even consider it. Not so sure that applies to new customers though, they won't hemorrhage customers but they could see a slow gradual decline as the odd large enterpris…

Millenials don't want to pay for software tools so Microsoft needs to take .NET to where they are, free OSes and compilers, so that they can earn them back in Azure with *BSD and GNU/Linux VMs.

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#24

Post by mathattack »

vertex-four wrote: post #11
RRRA wrote: post #5

It seems like no sane people would choose Oracle for a new project. Is that a company milking its legacy contracts and buy new legacy product until they can't follow fast enough? This kind of business model is a drag on the whole ecosystem, just like Microsoft as a monopoly stagnated the whole ecosystem until Linux broke out.

Probably no small company would, but Oracle doesn't make its money on small companies. Oracle does provide benefits for Fortune 500s and the banking industry, where projects are not going to be replaced for a very long time - there's a lot of configurability and their products can be made to do almost anything you could possibly want, now and in 30 years.

This. ^^^^

Oracle lives and dies from aggressive salespeople promising the world to large customers with long term contracts. The buyers get their needs met, and Oracle forces the developers (eventually) to build whatever was promised. The clients can configure what they want, and at some point after the initial buyer leaves, support gets cut to the minimum.

This is true for many large enterprise software companies.

This contrasts to the hands on attention from a startup. But you never know if the startup provider will be there in 3 years, or if they'll scale their engineering team.

This is why startups tend to sell to startups, and large companies tend to buy from other large companies. (Of course there are 100s of exceptions)

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#25

Post by Roboprog »

kod wrote: post #12

Java EE can die in a fire. Only thing that matters at this point is that the JVM stays relevant.

I hear you :-)

We have been doing an app rewrite at work to do a rich HTML/JS client, reducing the Java back-end to just REST services. As far as I'm concerned, there is still too much "Enterprise!" in the back end, but we have a legacy codebase to try to recycle.

I'm not ready to go pure Node.js, but I wouldn't mind coding the backend on Nashorn, skip the Object-{Relational/View}-Mapping make-work, and only drop into legacy Java as a last resort. However, I'm the only pro-dynamic language (as well as functional programming) fan at work, so that's a non-starter.

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#26

Post by maxxxxx »

noir_lord wrote: post #18
insulanian wrote: post #14

Now that .NET Core runs on Linux, there is an alternative at least.

Theoretical alternative, while I'm deeply excited about .NET Core on Linux (mostly for when F# is fleshed out) it's not got the massive ecosystem Java has yet and might not have for a while since Java on Linux (and others) has been around quite a while.

If Microsoft would create a bridge that allowed use of Java libraries from .NET I think a lot of projects would consider moving to .NET. A while a go I did some text processing projects and the existence of frameworks like Lucene and Tika alone were a big argument for Java.

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#27

Post by Nelson69 »

Is there a specific implementation that people are worried about or the EE specification?

Was there ever a time people were happy with the J2EE/EE process? It moves slowly, the opensource and smaller implementations do lots of cool stuff that isn't part of the specification. The big money implementations generally seem and feel like they are years and years behind the times. Sun seemed to have issues actually listening to and working with the community too... And the regardless of any actual experiences, people just seem to love to bitch about Oracle.

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#29

Post by niroze »

sdlion wrote: post #7
simonh wrote: post #2

"It's a dangerous game they're playing," Not for Oracle it isn't.

I wouldn't invest (not even my time) in licenses and staff to work over a platform that won't be maintained in the next 5-10 years. Stability is better for business.

Exactly.

Long term stability, even if programmers/admins complain, is still the best option for a business.

Hobbyists can do whatever they want, a company isn't depending on what they do.

Re: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

#30

Post by JohnL4 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #26
noir_lord wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretical alternative, while I'm deeply excited about .NET Core on Linux (mostly for when F# is fleshed out) it's not got the massive ecosystem Java has yet and might not have for a while since Java on Linux (and others) has been around quite a while.

If Microsoft would create a bridge that allowed use of Java libraries from .NET I think a lot of projects would consider moving to .NET. A while a go I did some text processing projects and the existence of frameworks like Lucene and Tika alone were a big argument for Java.

Microsoft could've built that bridge 10+ years ago and chose not to. I don't expect them to change their minds now.
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