Sun sets: Oracle buys Sun

Finally the “Sun” has set over the land of Java. After years of ailment, Sun Microsystems entered into a union with Oracle Corporation. Initial talks with IBM failing, Oracle was the next logical choice to acquire Sun. Whether this union proves holy for the Java community is yet to be seen.

So what is the future of Java and related technologies? A million dollar question that does not have one single correct answer. But one thing is for sure there would be some turmoil. Sun had been the guiding light of the Java community for years. Whereas other companies like the erstwhile BEA, IBM and Oracle became rich on Sun’s technologies, Sun could never monetize them as well and never really came out of the doldrums in which it was pushed in during the recession of 2001. Ever since then analysts have been predicting the demise of this iconic company.

If a company is in trouble, one way out is to sell it to another. But is that the only way out? Apparently that’s what people think nowadays. Well surely there has to be other ways. Apple turned around without selling. There are other companies that also survived without selling themselves. I wish Sun could have done it.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle finds itself in a rather enviable position much to the chagrin of IBM – a miffed suitor. What happens to the Sun’s software product portfolio is anybody’s guess. Here’s a list of potential products that can be affected:

• MySQL: The open source database that was already dealt a heavy blow with Oracle’s acquisition of InnoDB. Will this be the last of MySQL?
• Netbeans IDE: With Sun’s backing, Netbeans has become a leading IDE for Java development. Oracle’s JDeveloper will surely have an effect on this brilliant piece of software.
• Glassfish Application Server: Another open source product that has been very well received by the Java developer community. With BEA’s Weblogic in its kitty, does it make sense for Oracle to further the cause of Glassfish?
• Open SSO: Sun’s open source security component for the enterprise. Will Oracle have a need for this?

Oracle, in turn, gains a lot more. First and foremost is Java. Java has become the predominant technology in enterprise software computing. With Java in its bag Oracle gets to call the shots on how things should move ahead. Whether this is good or bad is a subjective question.

This leads us to the most important question of all – will the Java Community Process(JCP) lose its democratic nature? Well it’s surely going to be affected and with Oracle leading the charge chances are many of the enhancements that make their way into future releases are stuff that Oracle wants. Of course there has to be some sort of consensus. But with Sun and BEA out of the way, who dares cross Oracle? IBM? Sure and it will. Specially now since they have lost Sun to Oracle.

I wish to God that what I say next does not come true. With IBM and Oracle on board, the JCP process might well become the battleground of egos. There is a high chance of conflict arising between these two companies. Till now Sun had worked as a mediator of sorts and things were chugging along. But now the situation is completely different. Both Oracle and IBM have the necessary tools and wherewithal to provide end-to-end services to customers. So why should one follow the other? If these two behemoths do not work well together, we might pretty well be headed towards a branch in Java technologies. So maybe we will have an IBM Java/JEE stack and an Oracle Java/JEE stack. Such a split may very well prove to be a crippling blow to the Java community.

Maybe, Java and related technologies should be spun off as another independent organization. This organization can be funded by the other stakeholders like Oracle and IBM but their processes should be free of any influence of a corporate body. A third party mediation strategy is extremely important.

But if a split does happen, where do we, the Java developers, go? Do we align ourselves with one of the two giants or is there another route? How about OpenJDK? I understand that it still has some way to go. But can it provide that other route?

First impressions: The return of Palm – The Palm Pre

After pioneering a revolution in mobile devices like PDAs and smart phones, Palm, as of recent times, has found itself more and more out of the market due to stiff competition. Currently it is ranked fourth after the likes of Apple, Research In Motion(RIM) and Windows Mobile. All that is pretty much set to change if what Palm showed in CES lives up to its promise. And there is a high chance that it would.

Enter the Palm Pre. This is Palm’s latest entrant in the land of mobile devices, more specifically the smart phone segment. This segment is dominated by Apple and RIM. Even though Palm did have some success with its Centro, Treo and Treo Pro lines of phones, it was nowhere near to regaining the coveted leader position. With the Pre, Palm is pretty well set to pose a challenge that is serious enough to even topple the revered Apple iPhone.

If looks could kill or rather dethrone the iPhone, the Palm Pre has it. If functions and performance can poach users, the Pre has that. If coolness is such an important factor that entire cults grow around that, the Palm Pre is well equipped. The new design features a touch screen interface along with a slide out full keyboard. It sports Palm’s latest operating system the WebOS. The combination is stupendous.

The Pre is not only a pretty looking phone, but packs a mean punch too. There is innovation at its best coupled with legendary usability. Here’s a look at a few innovations that the Pre comes with.

Wi-Fi, GPS and email are standard on the Pre. The new Synergy system also allows a user to see all the conversations with a certain contact in a chat style. The universal search feature allows searching across contacts, Google, applications and even Wikipedia. Pretty cool, huh!

The Pre treats each running application as an activity card. Multiple applications can run in parallel and a user can switch between these running instances or activity cards with the mere flick of a finger. No longer do you have to close your email application to browse a web site. All notifications, like the ones for new messages, appear at the bottom of the screen and does not interrupt the user’s current activity. Quite nifty I say.

The calendar application in the Pre can show a combined logical view of calendars stored in Outlook, Google Calendar and Facebook. Also if a single contact is stored in different applications, they can all be linked together.

The browser is full featured and fast. It supports full HTML and has the now ubiquitous zoom and pan functions. Also all the applications installed on the phone are constantly updated via the internet. This gets rid of the rather dull “Update now” function.

Another innovative feature is the Touchstone wireless charging station with which the Pre can be recharged. The Pre attaches to the Touchstone device through magnets and remains in position without any cables or wires connecting the two. The phone can be used while charging.

The Plam Pre appears to be of fantastic value with the necessary looks and coolness. Check out the following gallery of images taken from the Palm website:

Here are the specs as detailed on Palm’s site and do not forget to watch the keynote presentation:
Carrier
Sprint
Operating system
Palm® webOS
Network specs
3G EVDO Rev A
Display
3.1-inch touch screen with a vibrant 24-bit color 320×480 resolution HVGA display
Keyboard
Physical QWERTY keyboard
Email
Microsoft Outlook® email with Microsoft® Direct Push Technology
POP3/IMAP (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, etc).
Messaging
Integrated IM, SMS, and MMS
GPS
Built-in GPS
Digital camera
3 megapixel camera with LED flash and extended depth of field
Sensors
Ambient light, accelerometer, and proximity
Media formats supported
Audio Formats: MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP, WAV
Video Formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264
Image Formats: GIF, Animated GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP
Wireless connectivity
Wi-Fi 802.11b/g with WPA, WPA2, 801.1x authentication
Bluetooth® 2.1 + EDR with A2DP stereo Bluetooth support
Memory
8GB of user storage (~7.4GB user available)
USB mass storage support
Phone as laptop modem
Bluetooth tethering
Connector
MicroUSB connector with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
Headphone jack
3.5mm stereo
Palm® Touchstonecharging dock
Compatible
Dimensions
Width: 59.5mm (2.3 inches)
Height: 100.5mm (3.9 inches)
Thickness: 16.95mm (0.67 inches)
Weight
135 grams (4.76 ounces)

Business rules: The good and the bad

Couple of weeks back I attended a conference on business rules. Needless to say there were technologies on display that were brilliant to say the least.

There were presentations by some of the most well known people in the business rules community. Personally I found Professor Simchi-Levi and Steve Demuth’s presentations quite brilliant. Both of them emphasized on the need of using optimization tools alongwith business rules to make a business more agile. And I totally agree with them. Agility is of utmost importance in today’s world and it should be considered by each and every business.

Professor Jan Vanthienen’s presentation on decision tables was simply brilliant. He was lucid in his explanations and easily got across to people, some of whom did not have much experience in business rules. Sun Microsystem’s presentation on how they used a rules based strategy for risk mitigation was also very interesting. 

The ones I mentioned above were the ones that I found particularly interesting. But all the presentations had to offer some pearls of wisdom.

And of course, there were some fantastic products on display. The big ones like Ilog and Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor displayed their latest versions that offered many advanced features. Also there were some smaller players like Delta-[R] and InRule whose products were also equally interesting. Open source was represented by JBoss Drools and Open Rules. Needless to say, the guys at Drools and Open Rules have quite compelling propositions. Open Rules for instance allows business rules to be specified in spreadsheets and have application code evaluted against these spreadsheets!!! Quite a novel way of thinking and doing things. Spreadsheets are, after all, the most popular tool amongst business users.

A common drawback of all the systems was the lack of migration capabilities. For instance if you are running Ilog and want to switch to Open Rules, there isn’t any easy migration paths available. Most of the vendors did offer to do the migrations for me but none had a software solution. The question is why? And the answers seems to be lying in the lack of standards in business rules.

Till now every rules engine vendor has its own proprietary way of handlling rules. There are no standards for this. The Object Management Group (OMG) is currently working on a specification for business rules. This is called Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules or SBVR. SBVR seems to be a step in the right direction but it is still far away from being accepted as the standard by all the vendors. 

Quite a few people are of the opinion that standards would hurt the profitability of the rules engine vendors. I think its actually the opposite. Standards always give the users a certain peace of mind when using technology products. Take for instance the Java Enterprise Edition platform or JEE. JEE is essentially a specification and different vendors like Red Hat, Oracle and IBM offer servers that are compliant with this specification. Are these companies any less profitable? The benefit of standards far surpasses the disadvantages. A standards based approach is always more attractive to users since they can choose to move on to a different product in future. This flexibility, even though not commonly exercised, is very important. 

Business rules should adopt the path taken by JEE and have a community driven process to develop standards and also coax vendors to make their products compliant. The vendors, on their part, can offer added features and services that can make the life of a user easier. That’s what would determine which product is better than the others. For now, due to the lack of standards, an apples-to-apples comparison of different rules products is difficult.

Business rules are used by some of the largest companies in their mission critical applications. The potential that business rules has is huge. However, to live up to its full potential, business rules needs to have standards and they need those standards soon.

Fragmentation in Linux hinders mass adoption

A few days back I ran a couple of posts titled Switch to Ubuntu Linux not Mac OS and Mac OS is better than Ubuntu: A myth. Both the articles generated significant interest amongst readers and there were quite a few comments. Most of the comments were in favor of the Mac OS and against Ubuntu. That led me to conclude that the Mac OS user community is extremely loyal towards it. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the Linux users.

Of course there were a few Linux users who defended Linux against the onslaught of comments from the Mac users, but they were far outnumbered. I thought that the Linux users were a loyal and dedicated group of people who were passionate about the technology and had a unified voice against proprietary systems. Sad to say but that apparently is not the case.

Why is that so? Probably the answer lies in the fragmentation that exists in the Linux community. There are a whole lot of Linux distributions available in the market and each have their own base of loyal users. But these users will not come to the defense of a Linux distribution or flavor which is other than their own. So with Ubuntu/Kubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, Linux Mint, Mandriva, and a plethora of other distributions around this fragmentation in user loyalty is hurting Linux and open source as a whole.

What is needed is a set of standards that would abide all the Linux distribution vendors together. Most versions of Linux run either Gnome or KDE as their windowing system. Most use a kernel that comes from a single source. But the package management systems do vary from flavor to flavor. We can argue the merits and demerits of each of these but we have to reach a standard approach. Proprietary systems like Windows and Mac OS do not have this problem. Apple and Microsoft can dream of any “feature” and then incorporate that in their system. Loathe it or like it those “features” remain with you. In case of Linux the user is the driver. He/She decides what they want to keep or discard. Though this choice makes Linux a lot more attractive to many, it appears  intimidating to others. This is where we have to make things happen. This is where Linux needs to change.

There is not doubt that technically Linux is probably superior to both Windows and the Mac OS, but unfortunately user adoption rates are dismal. One of the major reasons is the lack of standards and the sooner the Linux community understands this the better for them.

The most common response to a proposal to use standards is “how are the vendors going to make money?”. Presence of standards does not tie vendors up. Rather it opens up newer opportunities for them. For instance if Linux comes up with a standard for package management, that would enforce a uniform binary distribution format for all Linux flavors. This is good because vendors do not have to release versions of their products for .deb, .rpm and other formats. Where Linux vendors can make their offerings more compelling is in defining good UI features, making file management easier, making program management better, etc. The opportunities are endless.

Standards are needed. Lets think of them as a common minimum program to which every Linux vendor subscribes. This would lead to greater interoperability between different distributions and also make it easier for people to choose. A common minimum program would guarantee certain features in all Linux systems. The rest is up to the Linux vendors

JavaScript is the future of RIA

A few days back I had written an article about JavaScript being the future of RIA. Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, etc. are all nice and good to have. The fact of the matter is that a whopping percentage of people still prefer JavaScript when it comes to implementing RIA solutions. 

To corroborate this claim of mine, I had been running a poll for quite some time now. After having got around 550 odd votes I think the time is now right to publish the results. The winner by a far and clear margin is JavaScript. Flex comes second. Here is graphic showing the results:

With the release of the new breed of web browsers that run on-steroid JavaScript engines this dominance of JavaScript in the field of RIA is most likely to increase.

The data presented here is not sponsored by any camp or company. Its strictly a poll that I ran in my personal capacity.

JavaScript for RIA gets yet another boost from WebKit SquirrelFish

Rich internet applications or RIAs are becoming a defacto standard for web applications. The selling point of RIAs is to provide responsive web applications that behave more like desktop applications than traditional web apps. Initially JavaScript seemed to be the only option for creating RIAs but it suffered from certain maladies, most important ones being performance and cross-browser compatibility. Taking advantage of this, Adobe came up with Flex and more recently Microsoft offered Silverlight. Both these platforms took away a portion of developers who were working on providing RIA capabilities in brower based apps.

With the popularity of Flex and to a limited extent Silverlight, JavaScript seemed to be heading for certain death until recently. The announcement of TraceMonkey from Mozilla and the subsequent release of Google Chrome that incorporated a JavaScript virtual machine called V8, JavaScript seems poised to make a come back. Both TraceMonkey and V8 have put the JavaScript engines on steroids and the reported boosts in performance are impressive. TraceMonkey is slated to be released with Mozilla Firefox 3.1 but interested people can have a taste of it by using the v3.1alpha releases from Mozilla’s web site. Chrome has already drawn rave reviews with its fast performance and responsiveness of JavaScript apps.

The latest salvo in this war between JavaScript and other technologies comes from WebKit. WebKit forms the core of brilliant web browsers like Apple Safari, KDE Konqueror and Google Chrome. The programmers at WebKit recently announced their own improvements in the JavaScript engine called the SquirrelFish Extreme. This new engine is supposed to be more than twice as fast as its previous incarnation. Here’s a graphic to show the performance boost:

According certain other studies SquirrelFish is reported to have beaten Google’s V8 and Mozilla’s TraceMonkey on performance. Click here for that study.

So is SquirrelFish Extreme the fasted JavaScript engine yet? Well we would have to wait for some more data to decide that one. But one thing is for sure – JavaScript is here to stay.

With all this attributed importance to JavaScript by the major players, the indication is stronger than ever that RIA developers would switch over to JavaScript once its major problems are sorted out. The work that is being done seems to be concentrating on this very aspect. 

Is this the second coming of JavaScript based applications? Just wait and watch.

Mozilla Labs Aurora: What web browsers are going to be

Mozilla labs is where Mozilla experiments with new technologies and applications. One of those experiments is the next generation web browser. Aurora is a concept video created by Adaptive Path in partnership with Mozilla Labs. So what is shown in the video below is more of a concept rather than an actual application that is in incubation. Nevertheless, its worth a watch.