Java After the Oracle Acquistion

By Marty Knuckles

I was curious to see what the Java community thought about Oracle's acquisition of Java, so I did a google search for +Future and +Java and the results were pretty interesting, especially the results that turned up with James Gosling's name in them. James, as you may know, has the reputation as the father of Java. It seems that James went to Oracle as part of the SUN acquisition, but left only a few weeks later. Based on my experiences at Oracle, I will read it as a bad sign. Things like this usually indicate political and territorial infighting at fairly high levels in the company.

Mr. Gosling made some insightful comments in his InfoWorld interviews. He believes Oracle understands the server side stuff, JVM, and the like and that it is critical to their future direction as wll as their middleware stack. He has serious doubts about Oracle's understanding of the device side of Java. He cites mobile devices as an example.

Additional articles turned up by my search seemed to cast a cloud over the future of Java. One article was an interview with Robert Dewar. Professor Dewar pointed out the decline in popularity of Java and the rise of alternatives such as Ruby. Another article pointed out the age and staleness of Java.

If I were a weatherman, I'd likely give this forecast: the Java core seems to have settled over Redwood Shores and shows little likelihood of moving any time soon. Although the core appears to be stable and may actually improve and grow over time, its future remains cloudy because of competition from its other siblings in the middleware stable and because the people best qualified to do the care and feeding are not yet integrated into the Oracle culture. Significant defections have occurred and are forecast to continue. These conditions and other uncertainties are likely to accelerate the decline in Java popularity and the whole mess could be outsourced to Mumbai.

FWIW


Marty