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With Sun finally announcing that Open Source Java will be here in 2007, ZDNet's Dana Blankenburg asks the relevant question, "Should you care?" He considers Sun's move to be purely defensive in the face of the rising star of .NET.
What do you think? Is Sun's announcement too little too late? Does .NET have the momentum? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below.
For those of you in the Charlotte metro, New Equities is once again hosting the Charlotte Java User Group's (CharJUG) monthly meeting. The presentation topic will be:
Enterprise Content Discovery with SOA
The presenter will be Gavin Sutcliffe, whose most recent activity has been to migrate Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence community information systems from proprietary systems to service oriented architectures. He will cover the following topics:
Date and Time:
Tuesday, Sept. 19, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Location:
New Equities Offices
200 South College Street
Suite 1630
Charlotte , NC 28202
704.373.6373
(Map)
Space will be limited, so RSVP now at the CharJUG Meetup site.
New Equities is pleased to be sponsoring the CharJUG's August meetup, which will be held Monday, August 21st, 6:30 pm at our headquarters in downtown Charlotte. This month's guest speaker will be Dave Johnson from Sun:
Beyond blogging: Atom format and protocol
Like XML-RPC and SOAP before, feeds and publishing protocols were born in the blogopshere and quickly moved beyond blogging. Nowadays, web service providers are using RSS/Atom feeds and REST-based publishing protocols as lightweight alternatives to SOAP. And developers are finding new ways to combine web services from different sites into new applications, known as "mash-ups" in the lingo of Web 2.0. If you'd like to do the same, then attend this talk to learn about the new IETF Atom feed format (RFC-4287) and the soon-to-be-finalized Atom protocol, which together form a strong foundation for REST-based web services development.
More information at the CharJUG Meetup site.
Tonight. New Equities is hosting. The presentation is "Java Service Faces" with Tyler Williams. Details here.
New Equities will be host and sponsor for The Charlotte Java User Group (CharJUG) June Meetup on June 20.
The meeting will be held at the New Equities offices in Charlotte and there will be a presentation on SOA architecture and the Apache ServiceMix project. It will cover some of the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture and how new tooling and products can be used to provide a solid integration infrastructure.
The evening program is:
6.30pm-7pm - Networking
7pm-8pm - Presentation on SOA and talk
8-8.30pm - Networking
Space is limited. RSVP at CharJUG's Meetup page. See you there.
Mating cats and dogs alert: ZDNet's David Berlind has an interesting report on a new partnership announced by Mainsoft and Azul Systems that allows .NET apps to run in a J2EE environment at the speed of accelerated Java. How? By translating .NET source into Java bytecode and running it on an a dedicated network attached processor:
Whereas the old-school (I can't believe I'm calling it old school) XML integration basically puts a layer of XML-based abstraction between the two normally incompatible code-bases, the new school a la Mainsoft and Azul's partnership takes .NET source code, turns it into Java bytecode (that's Mainsoft's job) and then runs that code on Azul's network attached processor. The result, say the two men, isn't just a new form of Java/.NET integration, it also is a way of taking .NET applications that still run out of gas after being put on the most powerful systems, and squeezing even more peformance out of them.
If you're in either the .NET or Java/J2EE camp and interested in the possibilities of this sort of integration, ZDNet includes a podcast of an interview with Mainsoft's Sales and Service VP Ron Johnsen and Azul's Chief Marketing Officer Shahin Khan. The podcast is also playable directly as an MP3.
With the JavaOne Conference right around the corner, it's the question that seems to be on everyone's mind, according to a recent article in EWeek:
So far, Sun has resisted many calls to open-source Java. The reason: Sun fears doing so will open the doors for competitors to grab and change Java, resulting in the kernel forking and compatibility problems.
John Loiacono, Sun's former executive vice president of software, who recently took an executive position at Adobe Systems, of San Jose, Calif., admitted as much in an exclusive interview with eWEEK. "One of the projects we were working on was how far we should go with opening Java, to the point of absolutely open-sourcing it. But we always came back to the question of who we were ultimately appeasing with the move and how such a move benefits Sun customers and shareholders," Loiacono said.
Other former Sun executives have a different take. Peter Yared, a developer who was Sun's chief technologist for network identity before leaving in 2003 to become the CEO of San Francisco-based ActiveGrid, said the big question is how Java benefits Sun's shareholders today, especially since "Sun doesn't make any money on it," he said.
"It is losing momentum against open-source up-and-comers like LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/ Python/Perl]. They can continue to get the same certification revenue by licensing the Java trademark," Yared said.
Sun's new CEO Jonathan Schwartz seems to be leaning in that direction, based on the description of his co-keynote with Sun Senior Vice-president Jeff Jackson, found on the JavaOne Conference site. it reads in part (emphasis mine):
Join Jonathan and Jeff, for a look at the latest Java platform and tools advancements, the continued openess and expansion of the Java community, and a glimpse into the new markets Java technology is powering. Your future is waiting.
Philosophically, open-sourcing Java seems like it would align Sun with its natural constituency. The key question is where the value lies for Sun: in controlling the code or controlling the brand?
Newly appointed Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has posted his first blog entry since taking the reins. He uses the space to acknowledge the contribution of outgoing CEO and founder Scott McNealy, who remains the company's chairman:
You may not remember what it was like in 1992, but Wall Street had Sun in its sights - Scott was getting all kinds of flak for not following the rest of the industry. He'd refused to endorse one particular technology, known then as the Chicago Project. A few of the pundits said, "The Chicago Project is the future, and Sun's fighting it." Scott didn't think so. They said he was religious.
But he wasn't making a bet. He was fulfilling a vision. A vision that was obvious to him, and a vision in which the Chicago Project would play a bit part - we had bigger things to focus on.
If you don't remember the Chicago Project it was the code name to Microsoft's Windows 95. The companies that adopted it - and replaced their own innovation - well, you can't name them any more. They lost their ability to participate in the future, to differentiate.
What happened to Sun? Scott, and leaders across Sun, changed the world - by making an unpopular, but wildly successful bet on the internet as a driver of demand for systems innovation. The network is the computer.
Today, legions of Java developers can thank McNealy for his tenacity in pushing Java/J2EE into the limelight and helping to midwife the burgeoning open-source movement (in which new CEO Jonathan Schwartz played a pivotal role).
Jason Stamper of Computer Business Review has more, including this observation:
Incidentally, you'll remember that I mentioned in a previous posting about the return on investment of corporate blogs that Schwartz's blog is likely to deliver sound ROI, going on what we know about its traffic and likely lead generation, let alone what it does for Sun's visibility, credibility and branding.
I wonder though if Schwartz will be able to dedicate quite so much time to his blogging now that he is CEO and president of a technology company with a market cap of $17bn and sales last year of over $11bn.
Yes, I can definitely see how that might be a distraction from his blogging schedule.
JasperSoft is attempting to shake up the Business Intelligence marketplace with its announcement of a Java-based open-source BI suite:
The Jasper Intelligence product line will include a server for generating reports. In about a month, the company is expected to release a component for doing analysis and then a so-called ETL product later this year for moving data between different sources.
The Java-based server products will complement the company's existing open-source product, JasperReports for generating reports.
Business intelligence software--a collection of products tools for analyzing business data such as sales records--is one area corporate customers continue to spend on, according to analysts' surveys. The segment is dominated by larger, full-service companies, such as IBM and Oracle, and specialized vendors, such as SAS, Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion.
JasperSoft's strategy is to undercut entrenched vendors on price with a simpler product, said Paul Doscher, CEO of JasperSoft. It is designing its product to appeal to developers, who can take the software and embed data analysis into applications they write, rather than try to sell directly to end users.
IBM, Cognos and SAS are probably not losing much sleep at this point, but if nothing else, this may provide an inexpensive entry point into the BI space for developers looking to expand their range of capabilities.
ONJava.com profiles its readers in a recent survey that received nearly a thousand responses. If you're a Java developer, you might want to see how where you fall relative to their sample.
