Oracle's Ambitious Plan For Client-Side Java 292
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the real news out of this year's JavaOne is Oracle's ambitious plan to revitalize Java on the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. 'It's been tempting to assume that Oracle, with its strong enterprise focus, would ignore the client in favor of data center technologies such as Java EE. This week, we learned that's not the case. In fact, the real news from this year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco may not be Oracle's plans for Java 8 and 9, but the revelation that Oracle is gearing up for a new, sustained push behind Java for the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. If it can succeed in its ambitious plans, the age of client-side Java could be just beginning.'"
No Thanks (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No Thanks (Score:2, Insightful)
I've spent quite a bit of effort over the last two months removing Java from all of my clients' computers. I've seen it used as an attack vector far too often and it was time for Java to go. I've even got some - but not all - of my clients to let me remove Flash and Acrobat Reader. In the long run it's safer for them, and cheaper for them too.
Why is it that every Java story on Slashdot is infected by an IT Admin Monkey telling us that he's removing Java from his "users" machines. If these IT monkeys really wanted to remove the most targeted attack vector from their "users" machines they would replace "Windows" with something secure.
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Insightful)
> resource and memory hog
Got anything to show it's worse than .Net?
> there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for .NET
What, language-level exploits in Java? Care to give an example?
> Java development is light years behind .NET and C#.
Erm. Hey, quick, distraction! Behind you! *runs*
Seriously though, yes Java lags behind in features. Cross-platform development; Java runs on Windows, Linux, the BSDs, Blackberry phones, Android (well, it's a close varient) and frankly pretty much everything else too. I'll admit game development in Java is decidedly mixed (I believe, anyway, have never tried it myself).
Ultimately, there's a lot of code out there in Java, and it's not at all a bad platform, the world does not move on just because something a bit better comes out.
no need. javascript has too much momemtum (Score:5, Insightful)
Google was the best bet in bringing Java back to life.
But Oracle is suing Google for making Java somewhat popular again ...
I imagine even Google will give up on Java at some point with some new platform that exposes binder services to javascript, deprecates Java, and merges with Chrome OS.
Never ever going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
First, you would have to get every vendor to agree to this. Not a single one will. Oracle has spent time making enemies of most people required for such a plan to succeed, and their mission statement completely conflicts with the goals of the rest of the people that would be needed.
Oracle has been too confrontational with Google to get their help on anything that would advance Oracle's motives.
Since Oracle's angle is in effect reducing platform differentiation, Microsoft and Apple are not about to give them the time of day as success would simply erode whatever value they could possibly construct.
Open source communities have been sufficiently alienated by Oracle's goings on that they don't have a prayer in Firefox or other open source browsers either.
Combine this political obstacle with the simple fact that there isn't a large need to be filled. Between Flash and Javascript+HTML5, there isn't much to add to the web experience and for things like smartphone and desktop applications, the respective vendors have it too good right now in their walled gardens to relinquish control.
This didn't happen in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's not going to happen now.
Re:*yawn* (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sure, Java supports more platforms, but it's resource and memory hog, insecure (there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for .NET!)..."
Since installing Windows 7 (about a week back) I've had to apply more than 8-10 patches for .NET "security vulnerabilities" and "exploits" already.
No way. Tech4 said it was the only completely secure software ever written so it must be true.
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Insightful)
Brilliant, now try making it run on OpenBSD. Too weird? How about OS X?
Well done, you used a tool appropriate to the job, and got a good result. I've written C# apps to integrate with MS Office, platform-agnostic server apps in Java, high performance stuff in C, text processing tools in Perl and text adventures in Inform. In all cases, the language fitted what I wanted to do, well, but that doesn't make it inherently better than another language in some grand scheme of things.
.NET really hasn't taken over Java (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no fan of Java, but I run into it all the time.
On the other .NET is really lightweight,
So far as I have seen, most of the *appearance* of lightweight is achieved through preload. Conversely, most of the criticism of Java as bloated stems from a decade old impression and crappy app coders.
.You also get access to some devices that Java doesn't support
This is mostly a natural consequence of supporting many platforms. Platforms aren't different just for the fun of it, and supporting them all means mostly settling for the subset of ubiquitous capability. This applies to most scripting languages as well, though those typically get extended by platform-specific modules as they don't carry the stigma of being Java.
Also, Visual Studio is much better development IDE than any other.
Maybe for medium/large projects, but for quick stuff I still haven't found an IDE I like after trying visual studio/eclipse/etc/etc. Nothing beats vim and a compiler sometimes.
Re:No Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
If these IT monkeys really wanted to remove the most targeted attack vector from their "users" machines they would replace "Windows" with something secure.
Actually if they wanted to remove the most targeted attack vector they would remove the users from the machines.
HTML5 etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
um, i know it's being said quite a lot, already, but it's worth repeating: java's pretty much dead on the desktop. people are even replacing Flash applications with HTML5, as it's reaching high market share and maturity, especially now that IE9 has actually better (read "stricter") HTML5 compliance than the Free Software equivalents. how in god's name is oracle expecting to break into that?
the other thing that's worth emphasising is that when you have alternative language bindings to HTML5, you get the best of both worlds. so... why doesn't oracle put its money behind getting java bindings (or, better "generic" bindings like DCOM and XPCOM) on top of HTML5 browser engines? with Trident (the engine behind MSHTML aka IE) that's a done deal already: Trident (MSHTML.DLL and MSXML.DLL) already *has* DCOM bindings so it's a matter of about 2-3 weeks to get something like that up-and-running. XPCOM (XulRunner) is a little trickier: you'd have to find or create java bindings to XPCOM (they don't exist afaik) and the hardest (technically speaking) is webkit (used in android, safari, ipphon etc.)
then you have literally the best of both worlds. HTML5 as the "front-end", and whatever-language-you-choose to control and direct it. btw this is exactly what's been done for the pyjamas project (http://pyjs.org) except using python not java.
Re:*yawn* (Score:2, Insightful)
Same for me...and I code in Java for work on a daily basis.
The thing is, Java as a language/development platform has had everything I need and use for many years now. Sun (and now Oracle) have failed miserably to offer a compelling developer proposition outside of the core language and API. The EJB debacle just showed how much the Java community, and not Sun/Oracle, is driving the Java innovations that are actually useful.
What Java needs (and won't get, because there's no money for Oracle in it) is for Oracle to focus on improving the core VM and cleaning up the core APIs. On the VM side, they need to clean up class hierarchies and dependencies so that VM doesn't need to load so many classes at startup. On the API side, JSRs like 310 (Date/Time API) are needed to replace parts of the Java API that, quite frankly, suck. AWT and Swing are simply not as good as alternatives like SWT...I'd like to see Oracle deprecate them and work with IBM to include SWT in the core Java distribution. In the enterprise space, the only part of J2EE that I find compelling is the servlet spec, and even that needs a serious cleanup. JSP needs to be deprecated in favor of 3rd party tools like Freemarker, Velocity or any other templating language that encourages a stricter separation between presentation and business logic and does not require a container to evaluate and test.
For everything else, Oracle should let the community push the platform. The most useful parts of the Java platform have come from groups like Apache, Spring, IBM, Google and Redhat. The last time there were advances in the JDK or J2EE that actually affect my current work was in 2004 when Java 5 added many significant language features. So I've basically stopped paying attention to Java, the Oracle product, and anything Oracle has to say about Java and now only focus on what they community plans for it.
Re:Never ever going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
That is incorrect. Javas byte code manipulates a stack, the Dalvik VM is a register machine.
Re:*yawn* (Score:4, Insightful)
However application developers usually aren't happy with "basic hardware support", they want to OpenGL, H264 hardware acceleration, want to access webcam, microphone etc. Pure ANSI C is fine and dandy, but the real power comes from the (cross-platform) libraries, and that's what Java/Python/C# got right. People want batteries included.