Oracle Sun Acquisition complete

Earlier today, Oracle held an event to outline the road-map of acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the transformation from a software-only company (the third largest already) into a complete systems provider (integrated hardware and software solutions provider) that control each and every part of its ecosystem.

The event talked about many technologies that is affected by the acquisition, like:

Java

• JavaFX is the highlight of presentation layer technologies.
• Will continue to address Desktop (SE), Enterprise (EE) and Mobile (ME) platforms, and will try to converge the APIs between SE and ME and use JavaFX as the common presentation technology.

Application Server/Java EE

• GlassFish will join WebLogic as the Application Server platform for Oracle (positioning it for the Developers and the Open Source community while position WebLogic for the enterprise and mission-critical installations)
• GlassFish will continue to be the reference implementation, based on Open Source model, with commercial support for it, parts of it will be ported to WebLogic, most probably it will form the foundation for newer WebLogic releases and powers its Java EE-certified core.
• Web Center will be the strategic Portal solution (against Sun GlassFish Web Space)
• The JRockit JVM will be positioned on the same support level as the reference HotSpot JVM, most probably is that more interactions between the core-JVM and the JRockit in the upcoming years.

Developer Tools

• Oracle JDeveloper will continue to become the premier IDE for Oracle and Java Enterprise Applications (for Database and Java EE based Applications, SOA, and ADF-based applications)
• Oracle Pack for Eclipse will continue to be developed to provides integration between Eclipse and Oracle, but no major new offerings (which was expected)
• NetBeans will continue to be an Open Source offering, and stay as very wide covering as it is now (for covering the complete Java portfolio) and support for NetBeans Platform will continue.
• Support for Hudson, Oracle Team Productivity Center, maven, Subversion, BugZilla, and many other ALM tools to be shared among JDeveloper and NetBeans
• The Matisse Visual Forms Editor from NetBeans will be integrated in JDeveloper
• SOA & Application Server Adapters will be shared from JDeveloper to NetBeans

Operating Systems

• Continue support and development in Solaris and Unbreakable Linux
• Higher integration between the Oracle Database and Solaris ZFS

Virtualization

• Virtual Box will be continued to be developed and integrated with Oracle VM (to use the same Oracle Virtual Machine template format)
• Solaris Logical Domains (LDom) will become Oracle VM for SPARC and managed through Oracle VM management consoles
• Oracle VM for x86 will add support for Solaris
• Continued support for Solaris Containers and Dynamic Domains (on M Series Servers)
• Next version of Oracle VM will include Virtual Iron technology with better APIs and management console
• Sun VDI Broker will be continued to be development (including Secure Global Desktop)
• Oracle VM Storage Connect and ASM will continue to be used for Storage Virtualization
• Open Storage systems will be used for Storage at the hardware and low-level functions

Management

• Oracle Enterprise Manager (For managing Database, Middleware, and Applications) and Sun Ops Center (for managing Hardware, OS and Virtualization) will be support for the short-term
• Higher connectivity between Enterprise Manager and Ops Center will be developed in the mid-term to allow shared alerts and events, and allow some data to cross applications (12-18 months)
• In the long-term, the Enterprise Manager will consume the functionality of Ops Center and become the unified management console of all the Oracle products 

More topics tofollow in later posts...

A great article about JSF 2

I found a great article on the JSF 2 Spec (the View technology of choice for the Java EE 6 stack) and what's new/updated from JSF 1.2.

It serves as an overview to the new features in the JSF 2 and not as a comprehensive review of a single feature, it covers:

• The inclusion of the Facelets technology in the JSF standard and the View Declaration Language
• The composite components (or construct-your-own-component-without-major-hassle)
• New standardized Ajax support and the Ajax request lifecycle management
• The (inspired by Apache MyFaces Trinidad) partial state saving
• New system events
• Improved navigation system
• GET requests improved support and the view parameters
• The (Seam-inspired) additional scopes (View/Flash/Custom Scopes)
• The new (and much awaited) Managed Beans annotations
• New project stage declaration (for separation between production and development stages)
• The new client behaviors
• New bean validation system and the new validators
• Improved error handling
• Resource Loading

The article is available here What’s New in JSF 2 by andyschwartz

Oracle to Buy Sun, a second look

For some time now, I've been learning parts of the Java Enterprise Edition platform, and what I've seen is a great platform that can be the best-in-class if used properly and if it was easier to learn.

But what I find so much interesting is the multitude of frameworks in the market, two different presentation layer standards (JSP and its successor JSF), many different JSF extension frameworks (Apache MyFaces Tomahawk, Sun Woodstock, ICEfaces, JBoss RichFaces, Apache MyFaces Trinidad, Oracle ADF Faces), other not-in-the-specification frameworks (Tapestry, Struts, Apache Wicket, GWT, Spring MVC and others), many implementations of the JPA standard (the de-facto standard Hibernate, the JPA2 reference implementation EclipseLink, the Oracle TopLink, OpenJPA, and others), many Servlets containers (Tomcat, Jetty and commercial offerings) and various EJB containers, the complete enterprise applications building frameworks as Spring, Seam, and many others.

And that's just for the parts I explored so far.

Also the desktop front suffers from less overlap/duplication with 2 GUI widgets framework (the Java standard Swing, and the IBM/Eclipse influenced SWT framework) and their respective applications framework (the Swing Application Framework and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform).

The same is true in the IDEs front, we just don't have 2 major IDEs (Eclipse and NetBeans), but we have many commercial IDEs built over the Eclipse foundation (many of the IBM Rational offerings, RedHat/JBoss Developer Studio, Embarcadero/Borland JBuilder), some commercial offerings (most notably the IDEA IntelliJ) and the Oracle free (but less fair to play with the market standards) JDeveloper.

At first I just thought that is a waste of brain cycles and time of a talented and very smart community, and not just how many things has been done and redone and then-again redone, it is just plain confusing to try to learn or even design an application while taking in consideration the pros and cons of each framework/standard/application/library and presents a real challenge for a topic that could be easier to penetrate and learn, also such duplication creates many different-and-separated camps of experienced developers in the market.

But then I found that the real reason all these people are still in the Java camp is because of the ability to do things just as you want it (just think of any barely-reasonable way to do enterprise applications and chances are that a framework is out there waiting for you to be used) and the many different ideologies behind each framework (ranging from heavily-closed source and commercial frameworks to BSD-style open source frameworks) and that the ability of the Java community to re-invent the wheel when desired easily a key feature for the backing of virtually all the big software companies in the world (except Microsoft of course, not because it was uninterested, but because it wanted to play it too-hard with the market).

How such community will be affected by the Oracle acquisition is yet to be seen, but I'm not so optimistic as before, the Java EE may grow better under the Oracle umbrella, but it may be less free and less open to the community, which is exactly what the Java EE community doesn't need, the backing of the various software companies and open source communities what makes Java a market leader and the biggest player in the enterprise applications market.

I hope that Oracle understands the chemistry between Java and freedom (or it keeps enough Sun executives to keep such freedom possible) and that only a multiplayer game is a game worth playing.