oracle java blog - netbeans

So Oracle has now finally gotten their Sun. What does this mean for me and the javasphere?

A lot of people have strong feelings about the aqcuisition/merger and some feel strongly against Oracle. I don't. I don't love Oracle, but I think Java will be fine, if not better with their stewardship.

Java



Oracle needs Java, they use it all over their own product line and obviously especially with their former Bea products Java is core to their business. So an evolving, healthy and competitive Java is in their interest.

So Java, JEE, the Java VM platform etc will be fine, with more money available than at Sun. Actually it may be better as Oracle has a lot more funding and marketing capability, and it may revive the ailing JCP?


But what about the other Sun products, and specifically those related to Java?


Glassfish


I don't use glassfish, at least not directly, so personally I have no strong feelings on how Oracle will proceede with Glassfish compared to its more corporate Weblogic.

I use Weblogic at work and either Jetty or Tomcat on pet projects at home.


Kenai


Kenai was to be killed, but read somewhere today it may be saved.
I don't use it. I have a few projects on Sourceforge, and future ones may be on SF or perhaps google code or Github.


Netbeans


Netbeans however I do use.

In the initial press release by Oracle on its plans for Sun's product line they stated it was to be focused as a scripting IDE and leave JEE, java enterprise level, to their own JDeveloper and Eclipse tools.

I use it with Maven and JEE modules so this feature strategy change would affect me very much. I dabled with eclipse for a few years, and still use when forced to at work, but prefer Netbean's cleaner interface (Its not made by IBM...)

However again in an updated press release they have a seperate java tooling page regarding their plans and they may not restrict it to that. Lets hope not.


Cloud


Oracle killed Sun's cloud computing ambitions. Fine by me. They are not into being a hosting provider.

I use Amazon's ec2 a lot, and will not miss it. However I did not know enough about its features compared to ec2 and Google's App engine. It would have to be much better than those to have been worth it. Maybe it was more like Ubuntu's cloud offering with hardware hosting?


VirtualBox


VirtualBox I do use, and glad it looks like it will be kept as is, I think.


Solaris


I have no strong feelings for or against Solaris, but keeping it competitive is probably in their interest.

The hardware and other areas I am not too bothered about. I used Sparc at university, but not since.

Other links:
http://blogs.oracle.com/devtools/2010/02/updated_faq_for_the_developer.html
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/documents/webcontent/038563.pdf
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