Sun to be bought by Oracle for $7.4 Billion
I’m a little late on this to really consider it news in the sense that news is usually new. And I must admit I was sceptical when I first heard it, but it’s true. Sun themselves admit it : http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-04/sunflash.20090420.1.xml.
The mighty behemoth, proprietary squelchor of innovation, and extremely expensive Oracle is about to acquire the open-source, free, and always innovative Sun ( and with that Java!). Anyway I look at this it sucks – for Java, at least. This will, in my humble opinion, accelerate Java’s path to Cobol – which it is destined to become as more agile languages come to maturity and continue to grow in popularity ( ruby, python, erlang ).
Rod Johnson, with Spring, is singing an optimistic tune ( Spring Keynote Address on Future of Java ) . One that talks about Java having reached maturity and that it doesn’t really need to evolve anymore. C doesn’t really evolve – it does what it does and does it very well. As Rod says, “It doesn’t pretend to be C#.” Point taken. He goes on to say that in many ways the innovation in the Java community has already moved outside of the Java core. Language improvements include Groovy and Scala. Framework improvements come in the form of Grails ( and, he doesn’t mention this, Seam ).
Rod’s address is largely true, but it is also to drum up excitement for their new application generation project ROO. This gives alot of the functionality one would get from Rails or Seam, but does things within a shell rather than all command line. This is actually kind of nice because the shell can keep track of the context each subsequent command is running in and also allows for some pretty snazzy auto-completion features.
Should we Javaheads run around screaming the sky is falling? Probably not. But if we don’t get up to snuff with Grails and new projects like Seam and Roo which look to make things a whole lot RAD-der, then we’d better accept our role as stewards to the next generation of Cobol applications.
One more thing – Ruby, for example, is still missing a lot of enterprise tooling which we take for granted in the Java world. Applications like JConsole and JProfiler don’t yet exists – so another way to look at this is on the larger programming stage, where what we’ve learned with Java should be created for Ruby, Python, and Erlang to ease the passing of the torch when the time comes.
