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Oracle May Have Stopped Funding and Developing Java EE (arstechnica.com) 115

Posted by EditorDavid from the quiet-cubicles dept.
While anticipating new features in Java 9, developers also have other concerns, according to an anonymous Slashdot reader: ArsTechnica is reporting that Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from Java EE, the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren't otherwise based on Java, and customers and partners have invested time and code. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened, but the implications are huge for Java as a platform.
"It's a dangerous game they're playing..." says one member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee. "It's amazing -- there's a company here that's making us miss Sun." Oracle's former Java evangelist even left the company in March and became a spokesman for the "Java EE Guardians," who have now created an online petition asking Oracle to "clarify" its intent and resume development or "transfer ownership of Java EE 8".
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Oracle May Have Stopped Funding and Developing Java EE More

Oracle May Have Stopped Funding and Developing Java EE

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  • It should taken and placed in the public domain. Problem solved...

  • Um.. what are they suppose to do? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday July 02, 2016 @03:06PM (#52434617)
    Sun couldn't make any money off Java. Sun wasn't incompetent, they were stuck in a business model that became irrelevant (selling high end hardware). It's all well and good to say you should pivot to SaaS but that means selling access to software. If Oracle tries that with Java the community will just fork the damn thing. Where is the business model with Java that makes Oracle enough money to cover the expense of buying Sun? It wasn't in enforcing copyrights on Google, they lost that fight. What they're left with is really nice tech that can't make anyone a dime...

    • I think companies like Redhat (JBoss) and IBM and SAP disagree, they make plenty of money with Java.

      Also I see plenty of JDeveloper commercial licenses in Enterprises.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        JBoss and the peer implementations will probably be the future of Java EE. The fact that Oracle drops it just means that they drop their control over the solution and the worst that can happen is that the various implementations will diverge unless the companies developing the solution put in a joint venture to coordinate the APIs.

      • Re:Um.. what are they suppose to do? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02, 2016 @03:53PM (#52434885)

        The do not make money because the "own" Java, they make money because they "use" Java...

        Big difference there. The owner of Java would probably love to get a portion of the money that these users of Java are making. This would be realized through a licensing stream... which may be the end game of scaring customers into thinking that the current public product is going to get shit-canned

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          You do realize how many oracle app server licenses are sold to run java apps? Oracle is making tons of money off it indirectly, much like Microsoft makes money off people using .Net since they need the rest of their stack, which isn't free. ( at least until recently.. which i still question that move, they have an angle )

          Consider it an investment in your companies infrastructure. It may not make you money as an 'entity', but without it you dont have anything.

    • Selling high end hardware and a high end OS, to run hardware-independent and OS-independent Java?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )

      Sun's main driver behind Java was to provide a language that could compete with Microsoft's Visual suite (Visual Basic and Visual C++). They had to keep tight control of the language to prevent Microsoft from usurping it (remember the J++ lawsuit?).

      Sun succeeded to some extent, but it bled them to death. Their hardware couldn't compete with Intel and they weren't making any money on Java. Now Oracle is looking over their shoulder at Postgresql and not making any money on Java.

  • IBM & RedHat will form "O2EE" and life will go (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is Oracle playing it's usual games and it's introducing a hiccup in the J2EE lifecycle, it's ultimately not going to matter. If Oracle does take it's toys and go home because of the Google decision, IBM, RedHat and others will happily step in to create the O2EE alliance with other major players and life will go on. The J2EE server market is dominated by Tomcat and JBoss/WildFly, Weblogic has roughly 10%. Oracle can certainly cause trouble but they are in no position to kill J2EE.

    • The problem is Oracle will probably drag out the process, causing untold damage to the Java ecosystem in the process.

  • Lots of java in the banking finance world. I wonder how much of it runs on the EE platform.

    http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/... [oracle.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. They should have bought Sun and have it continue doing Java. Would have been cheaper than what is now happening.

    • For those not familiar with java EE, who, like me when I first saw this popping up on the tinterwebs thoght this was remotely a java..
      "Java EE" IS NOT what anyone familiar with Java would ever really use.

      Its more like a mish mash of highly specialized and mostly irrelevant java projects for corporate customers that I very much doubt anyone but the original client is using.

      This is not remotely equivalent to the java JDK we are all familiar with.

      At least, as far as I can tell. If someone can point me to somet

      • Re: Consequences in Banking/Finance? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        More precisely, Java EE is a collection of APIs.What most people are accustomed to is the Java SE API, which is part of the JDK. EE is implemented, partly or in full, by application servers.

        Although not all APIs in EE are widespread, some are pretty much the basis of Java application servers such as Tomcat, Jboss/Wildfly, Jetty, Glassfish and co.

        For example, Servlet and JSP are part of Java EE. While they are old specs and haven't changed dramatically through recent releases, I am pretty sure any Web develo

        • Im pretty sure that isnt true.

          For example. Tomcat (by apache foundation) is he implimentatiom for some of the more widely used java ee specifications. And is based on vanilla java.
          And gives jsp and servlets.

          There is a version combined with other java ee components (java tomEE). But Looking to see if it was true that tomcat is java ee is the first time Ive heard of it.

    • I work for a very large bank heavily invested in Java and while we are largely a Java shop for the Web tiers, most of what's done is no longer J2EE but rather Java in a servlet container with frameworks like Spring or Hibernate. In fact, we're largely shifting off of full fledged Java app servers (WebLogic, WebSphere, etc.) to simpler containers (e.g. Tomcat) as the needs are no longer there. Talking to my peers at the other big bank, it sounds like this is an industry trend.

      • The big, huge problem with Tomcat is that it doesn't scale well beyond a single instance running on a single server (unless something MAJOR has changed within the past year or two). Mostly, because it takes an eternity to start up after redeploying a new webapp, and starts responding to http requests with 502 errors (instead of just silently ignoring the connection requests) a minute or more before it's REALLY ready to handle them. And frameworks like Spring just make matters even worse.

  • See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/06/28/the-week-in-net-6282016/ [microsoft.com]

    In short, more cross-platform libraries for .NET while Java EE may be stagnating.

    As some people have commented on ArsTechnica, if this goes on Oracle risks that more corporate users switch to the .NET ecosystem. Which will not make Java obsolete overnight, but such trends tend to be self-perpetuating.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Be aware that Java EE is more than Oracle these days. Just because Oracle drops it doesn't mean that those that have developed various platforms compatible with the API will drop it.

    • I used to dislike .NET a lot, but as of late I've started coding more and more to it. It's easy to be productive with it and prototype stuff, but I still favor other platforms and technologies for long-term projects that require more robustness. Java, on the other hand, has always been a pain in the ass for me personally. Might be because it's just been misused so widely and after Sun, Oracle has also been a pretty damn good reason to hate it.

    • I hesitate to call any piece of software open source unless its maintainers affirmatively resign all rights to software patents that are even remotely relevant.

      • That would of course be nice, and IIRC the GPL V3 has some clauses to give the user protection against patent misuse.

        But in general, I'm fairly content if you get the source code, the right to redistribute it and no overly onerous license clauses to limit how you use it.

  • Is this a problem? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Saturday July 02, 2016 @03:22PM (#52434703)

    I see no less than 5 [wikipedia.org] independent, certified implementations of latest Java 7 EE spec, including one LGPL application server; Wildfly by Red Hat. I'm pretty sure the "community" can handle evolving the standards going forward, and it's blatently obvious that Java EE doesn't actually need Oracle's implementation for anything. Is anything of value being lost here?

  • Not trolling... but I think it is time and right thing to do.

    Don't misinterpret me... I worked in a Java house for 4 years. For the life of me, I can't understand why anyone should go for Java solutions at this day and age. Perhaps, it solved some problems around the time it was introduced. Fast forward to today, I find it overly complex, largely irrelevant and struggling to keep up.

    I guess Java will haunt all of us for another few decades, similar to Cobol, simply because of Android platform and many other

  • Java and Java EE: two different things (Score:5, Informative)

    by Guillermito ( 187510 ) on Saturday July 02, 2016 @03:32PM (#52434759) Homepage
    This affects less people and it is way less dramatic than what the summary implies. Java EE it's just a bunch of "enterprise" frameworks which run on top of the Java virtual machine. Many people using the Java platform don't even bother with Java EE and use other set of frameworks instead (like Spring or Hibernate), and even for those using some of the Java EE technologies, they are most likely using some third party (IBM Websphere) or open source (lJBoss, Tomcat) implementations, since the "official" Java EE implementation by Sun (and later Oracle) never gained much traction.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ahabswhale ( 1189519 )

      Agreed. Java EE is for dinosaurs. I don't know anyone who uses that crap anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 )

      This affects less people and it is way less dramatic than what the summary implies. Java EE it's just a bunch of "enterprise" frameworks which run on top of the Java virtual machine. Many people using the Java platform don't even bother with Java EE and use other set of frameworks instead (like Spring or Hibernate), and even for those using some of the Java EE technologies, they are most likely using some third party (IBM Websphere) or open source (lJBoss, Tomcat) implementations, since the "official" Java EE implementation by Sun (and later Oracle) never gained much traction.

      This is absolutely right. Sun were so slow evolving the Java EE spec, the user community took the lead and developed less high maintenance approaches like Spring. This won't affect most Java developers, even those developing "enterprise" applications.

    • And that is why java is terrible. There's no real common target, it is terribly fragmented. You have the language, which is standard curly brace plus a lot of nonsense convention.

      I get the academic rigor of some ways of doing things, but then you can choose any old framework, and various extensions because the core is missing features or functionality.

      You can't just be a java programmer. I would never hang my hat on just one aspect, but I don't see anyone being successful at java in general, as day one come

      • It is the other way around. The Java community has been signaling for years a lack of interest in what Java EE has to offer, and this decision by Oracle is just a response to that. It seems Java developers just prefer "chasing the fads". This is true for other development platforms too, like Node.js, Python, Ruby, where the main language is accompanied by a myriad of frameworks and libraries that you have to learn in order to become productive. This is a trend that you might not like but it is here to stay.

  • Java 9? meh... (Score:4, Informative)

    by zarr ( 724629 ) on Saturday July 02, 2016 @03:37PM (#52434781)

    I make a decent living off writing Java code, and after Java 8 came out I started liking it, not just tolerating it. Lambdas and method references, which I thought would be a nice-to-have, has turned it into a completely new language, streams are great, the multi-threading support is not too shabby and the new time API was loooong overdue.

    When reading the linked list (no pun) of new features though, all I can say is "meh"...

    Stuff like HTTP/2, TIFF and JSON support should be external, upgradable, libraries. Its a common theme that the standard java libraries fall into disuse after a while, because external library writers do a much better job of implementing the same concepts. JDBC, Date/Calendar, XML processing, HTTP are just a few examples.

    My key takeaway from this is that I'm a bit tempted to start using _ as an identifier name, just to fuck over any future maintainers of my code.

    • Lambdas and method references, which I thought would be a nice-to-have, has turned it into a completely new language, streams are great, the multi-threading support is not too shabby and the new time API was loooong overdue.

      This

      There is a reason that scripting languages aren't normally used for large applications. After the initial "wow that was super simple to write", you get to the phase where debugging takes forever, and maintenance is a pain in the ass. Maintenance is always the major share of soft

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Lisias ( 447563 )

        There is a reason that scripting languages aren't normally used for large applications. After the initial "wow that was super simple to write", you get to the phase where debugging takes forever, and maintenance is a pain in the ass. Maintenance is always the major share of software cost, and the amount of time it takes to write the initial code should be a secondary consideration (IMHO). Anyone who thinks a strongly typed language is just a pain in the ass probably hasn't done much long-term maintenance on a large system.

        And this is precisely the reason there're so much effort on "dynamic languages".

        The ideal programmer nowadays are cheap and disposable as the code he writes. There's no money on fixing production code, everybody wants to throw everythig away and rewrite from scratch every couple of years.

        Long term maintenance demands competent and experienced professionals - that costs more. Throw away code, written by throw-away programmers are cheaper on the short-run, leaving more money to be pocketed by the low and midd

        • Exactly. This is why I think the only thing that will supplant Java as the defacto language of business is a JS one like Node or its successors.

          Especially with web frameworks taking over all ui, now we can turn or crappy front end "web programmers" into server system programmers.

          • And don't think I hate node. My job is a JS front-end with Java back end. It predates node, someone may have picked that if they were to build it today. (But not me. I am ok with node, but I prefer Java 8.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e r ( 2847683 )

      Lambdas and method references, which I thought would be a nice-to-have, has turned it into a completely new language, streams are great, the multi-threading support is not too shabby and the new time API was loooong overdue.

      So Java finally caught up to where literally every other programming language including C++ had been for years???

      Need real performance? Use Fortran, C, or C++ PERIOD. Want "relatively good" performance? Use C#, Go, Rust, or, hell, even Nodejs these days-- why bother with that crufty awkward dinosaur called Java?

      Want something "easy to learn"? Use Python, Ruby, Javascript-- ANYTHING but pedantic and verbose Java.

      Want something that "runs everywhere"? Dude, literally every programming language does that

  • I am certainly not a fan of Java, but people who like java like it for the exact reasons I don't like it. Without going into those, I don't want the Java people flooding into languages I do like such as C++ and Python and trying to turn them into Java. The typical Python program, for instance doesn't need a PVM, it doesn't need 80000000 classes, and it doesn't need certification to get a job.

    So, I am begging someone very corporate and very stodgy to take over Java if Oracle abandons it. SAP, IBM, the US g

    • The typical Python program, for instance doesn't need a PVM

      What do you think CPython or PyPy is, if not a Python virtual machine? Good luck running a program written in Python on a PC running the Windows operating system without one of those installed.

  • Obviously executive management has no clue how to grow their business.

  • Java ecosystem will continue to live pretty well without Java EE specs.

  • And I say this as someone who's been in the Java/JVM space for almost 20 years. J2EE was a bad idea at the time, and has long been consigned to the scrap heap by anyone who knows what they're doing. I'm honestly amazed they were still investing in it up until this point. Just say "container managed persistence" to a Java dev and listen to them laugh :)

    All the major enterprises using Java that I have knowledge of dumped EE years ago (if they ever even adopted it), they're all in the Spring/Hibernate camp (wh

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