Oracle and the Java Ecosystem 157
First time accepted submitter twofishy writes "After an undeniably rocky start, which saw high profile resignations from the JCP, including Doug Lea (who remains active in the OpenJDK), and the Apache Software Foundation, Oracle is making significant efforts to re-engage with the wider Java ecosystem, a theme which it talked up at the most recent JavaOne conference. The company is working hard to engage with the Java User Group leaders and Java Champions, membership of the OpenJDK project is growing, and the company is making efforts to reform the Java Community Process to improve transparency. The firm has also published a clear, well-defined Java roadmap toward Java 8 and Java 9."
Re:Oracle matters less thank you'd think (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree, OpenJDK (specially for Java 6) has many incompatibilities. Try running Intellij IDEA on it (they don't recommend it), or even some app servers.
Re:Oracle matters less thank you'd think (Score:4, Informative)
But even if this were not the case the Java 'world' has a lot of alterantives: the IBM JDK, GNU GCJ, Apache Harmony. [...] This is one beauty (for end-users/developers) with the Java ecosystem.
Until what you wrote for for one doesn't work on the other. Java likes to say it's cross platform, but there's still lots of implementation specific hangups in the various JREs.
Re:I wish ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oracle matters less thank you'd think (Score:5, Informative)
I would recommend against using OpenJDK 6 for anything really. OpenJDK 7 is a bit different though, as it is the official Java SE 7 reference implementation [wikipedia.org].
I see OpenJDK 6 as their initial "hey, look at what we're working on", as they tried to completely open source the JDK (they had to re-write at least 4% of the Sun JDK when turning it into OpenJDK). With that re-write, lots of things were probably broken, and testing was required to get them working again. Now that OpenJDK 7 is out, Oracle, IBM and other will be putting their efforts into improving it and making it as complete as possible.
Re:Oracle matters less thank you'd think (Score:5, Informative)
Java has gotos:
loops:
for (int i = 0; i < MAX_I; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < MAX_J; j++) {
break loops;
}
}
Re:Java: Was write once run everywhere ever the ca (Score:5, Informative)
All depends on what you're doing with it. I work on an enterprise level webapp written 100% in java and we have deployments on Windows, Linux, Solaris and OSX-Server using the EXACT same code base and this is an app with over 1000 classes and 250k+ lines of code.
Re:Java: Was write once run everywhere ever the ca (Score:2, Informative)
But Java went on to run back-end server and enterprise systems, and there it really doesn't matter because people engineer for specific hardware.
Actually, that's precisely where I see the "write once run anywhere" in action. I have been developing server-side code for about a decade, and I have always done my development and testing on Windows, but deployed to either Linux or Solaris, without any platform problems whatsoever.