oracle – Page 3 – Kev's Development Toolbox

September 13, 2017

Major changes underway at Oracle: SPARC and Solaris teams laid off, Java EE oversight goes to Eclipse Foundation, future Java SE major releases proposed for twice a year

Oracle has been rather busy last few weeks. First, news that the Solaris and SPARC teams from Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems have reached the end of the road, and the majority of the teams have been laid off. The layoffs started at the start of this year, and the recent round apparently leaves only a small team left.

Last month there was a blog post to The Aquarium suggesting that Oracle would be open for another group or organization to drive stewardship for the Java EE spec. Looking back at past events, it’s no surprise that some significant changes were coming. Things started changing with the layoffs of the majority of the Java evangelists back in September 2015 and the letter assumed to be from one of the evangelists to InfoWorld stating that “… Java has no interest to them anymore”. Oracle’s lack of involvement in the development of Java EE started to gain notice by the other JCP members in minutes of the JCP Executive Committee in May and June 2016 leading to statements in the public minutes such as:

“…concern that Oracle, despite its role as steward of Java, has not made any public statements or explanations for the apparent lack of activity on Java EE”

There was also a formal statement by the JCR Executive Committee directed to Oracle formally voicing their concern with recent lack of JSR activity and involvement by Oracle:

“EC members expressed their serious concerns about the lack of progress on Java EE. They believe that Java EE is critical to the Java ecosystem and to their organizations and customers. They fully accept Oracle’s right to direct its investment where it wishes, but expressed the hope that they and other members of the Java community be permitted to step in and help with the ongoing development of the platform, particularly in areas where Oracle wishes to reduce its investment. They therefore requested a dialog with Oracle about how to make such a transition.”

This was followed in June 2016 by a statement by ‘Oracle spokesman’ Mike Moeller that Oracle were still committed to Java EE and were planning on a proposal to the community a t JavaOne 2016. This proposal turned out to be a ‘refocusing’ of the changes in the Java EE 8 proposal, namely dropping new features and changes that were not aligned with current industry trends (particularly microservices, so the MVC spec and a number of other proposals got dropped from the EE8 JSR).

From last month’s post that Oracle was open to consider another organization to drive future development of Java EE, yesterday it was announced (more here) that the Eclipse Foundation will be the new stewards of Java EE. Given Oracle’s recent lack of involvement, it’s great that they even considered this move, and hopefully the future of EE will be in good hands with the Eclipse Foundation.

If that news was not enough, Mark Reinhold also posted recently that after the slow release schedule of the past few major Java SE releases, they’re considering a twice yearly major release cycle moving forward after the planned release of Java 9 on September 21 (after many delays already). Two major releases a year is a massive change compared to the 3 year current release cycle (between Java 7 to Java 8 and between 8 and the upcoming Java 9 releases). Hopefully this means some good things are going to be coming to Java across the board, SE and EE, in the near future.

July 7, 2016

Oracle have something to announce re. Java EE 8 at JavaOne this year?

Oracle have been quiet on the Java EE front since around November 2015 according to public minutes from recent JCP Executive Committee meetings, which has led to the forming of the Java EE Guardians group forming to rally community awareness and promote the future of Java EE.

This story on The Register just popped up in my feed this evening, with an interesting quote from ‘Oracle spokesman’ Mike Moeller, stating:

“Oracle is committed to Java and has a very well defined proposal for the next version of the Java EE specification – Java EE 8 – that will support developers as they seek to build new applications that are designed using micro-services on large-scale distributed computing and container-based environments on the Cloud … Oracle is working closely with key partners in the Java community to finalize the proposal and will share the full details with the broader Java community at JavaOne in September.”

So there you go. Given that there is already an EE8 JSR in flight (JSR 366) encompassing many other JSRs that were planned to be included in EE8, this statement sounds suspiciously like Oracle has “something else” planned for EE8 that is not the EE8 JSR (“a very well defined proposal for the next version of the Java EE specification”).

In a thread on the Java EE Guardians Google Group, seems like no-one over there has any other insight into this news at this point.

Interestingly, microservices, large-scale distributed computing and containers… this is all very much on target for where EE needs to be heading.

If this is all Oracle is willing (or able) to share at this point, then it will definitely be interesting to hear what they have to share at this year’s JavaOne conference.

June 21, 2016

The future of Java EE as discussed at recent JCP Executive Committee meetings

If you’ve been following Java EE related news over the past few months, you’ll know that Oracle cut back on a number of its Java Evangelist employees, others such as Reza Rahman appear to have left of their own accord, and there’s a general concern than Oracle appears to have slowed down input on any Java EE JSR. Rahman has formed a group called the Java EE Guardians to drive community activity to support future development of Java EE and EE JSRs.

If you want more of an inside view to what’s going on, there’s some interesting reading in the form of the JCP Executive Committee meeting minutes which are public record. The minutes for June 2016 and May 2016 both had agenda items to discuss the future of Java EE. The minutes from the May meeting are very interesting, including comments such as :

“…concern that Oracle, despite its role as steward of Java, has not made any public statements or explanations for the apparent lack of activity on Java EE”

and recording of a statement to Oracle from the JCP Executive Committee formally voicing their concern:

“EC members expressed their serious concerns about the lack of progress on Java EE. They believe that Java EE is critical to the Java ecosystem and to their organizations and customers. They fully accept Oracle’s right to direct its investment where it wishes, but expressed the hope that they and other members of the Java community be permitted to step in and help with the ongoing development of the platform, particularly in areas where Oracle wishes to reduce its investment. They therefore requested a dialog with Oracle about how to make such a transition.”

Other concern recorded in the minutes was that Oracle holds IP rights for the majority of the JSRs that are in progress, and so passing responsibility on to other parties requires Oracle’s involvement to pass on ownership of this IP… something which they may agree to, or may not.

Minutes from April 2016 note:

“Martijn Verburg reported on behalf of the London Java Community that it now seems clear that little if any progress is being made on Oracle-led Java EE JSRs. (Some Oracle Spec Leads have admitted publicly that they are unable to spend any time on their JSRs, having been directed to work elsewhere.) He estimated that work on Java EE seems to have stopped around November 2015.”

So, it’s clear there is industry concern that Oracle has backed off from involvement with development of JSRs for Java EE8. The question is, what happens now?

September 30, 2015

Are Oracle abandoning Java?

That’s an alarmist question, but recent goings on at Oracle suggest something is changing.

Today there was an eye opening story on InfoWorld about a letter from a ‘former high ranking Java official’ (maybe one of the Java Evangelist team recently laid off?), that

… the company [Oracle] was becoming a cloud company, competing with Salesforce, and “Java has no interest to them anymore.” The subject line cited “Java — planned obsolescence.”

This follows the recent layoffs in August/September of several key players on their Java evangelist team: Simon Ritter, Cameron Purdy, James Weaver, and others.

Maybe I’m scraping the barrel for facts here, but I noticed earlier this year that the java.net site hadn’t been updated with any new stories or updates since April:

And @javanetbuzz, who used to tweet Java related stories from the java.net site hasn’t tweeted since February 18th this year:

Incidentally, this might just be horribly bad timing, but both java.net and netbeans.org websites have been down today:

So have Oracle been quietly ramping down their Java related efforts this year? JavaOne is only 3 weeks away at this point – is there going to be some news or announcement from Oracle about their plans for Java, or are they just going to continue as if nothing has changed?

Updated: As I wrote this, java.net is back with this message (although this is dated from a few days back, so I’m assuming this message was already there on the site for a few days):