JavaOne: What Sun didn’t say…
As is always the way with these things, attending a big show like JavaOne means you do tend to focus on what Sun Microsystems itself had to say – especially when the company has just been bought by the fourth richest man in the world. What they didn’t get to say until early this Wednesday UK time is that Sun shareholders get to vote on July 16 on the whys and wherefores of the Oracle take over.
What I also failed to report on during last week’s show were the partners. The invites came in from all angles, dinner with AMD, chin-wagging with Livescribe Inc. about the pre-release of its Platform SDK 1.0 for mobile computing, beers with Red Monk’s effusive experts – I hardly managed one of them. So it seems only fair as I did last year to a little flavour to the Java brew and see who else is positioned up close to the platform and the language. Perhaps Oracle will listen to these industry partners, protagonists and practitioners to guide the next stage in the stewardship of this much-venerated technology.
High up on the list of people who I wished I had had time to spend with was dynaTrace software. I exchanged mails with the company’s technology strategist Alois Reitbauer during the show wrap up and he told me that he thought the Microsoft keynote at JavaOne last week was evidence of the increasing demand for interoperability between Java and .NET systems. Right, we knew that, but he did put some colour to his point and sent me a follow up statement.
“Heterogeneous systems are often developed by different teams or even different organisations. The tools used by these groups often only provide insight into a single platform and this lack of tool-level interoperability makes it difficult to solve problems that have their root cause spread throughout the heterogeneous systems or in the interface between the systems. This becomes even more complex when the business context of a transaction has to be understood across system boundaries. Only an integrated solution that effectively operates in both Java and .NET environments can solve this issue and ensure sustainable interoperability,” said Reitbauer.
A big favourite of mine was a chap I spent some time with on the fringes of the pressroom called Kelvin D. Meeks, who is founder of systems integration consulting firm International Technology Ventures Inc. in Bellevue Washington (state not DC). Meeks has great opinions to share on sushi, sailing and SOA. More specifically he told me that he enjoyed meeting companies like Vertica and getting to see its database product for data-intensive data warehouse applications.
“I’ve also had some interesting conversations with the folks at ZeroTurnAround.com about their JavaRebel technology, which they claim will significantly improve programmer productivity by reducing the re-deployment time for developers that want to iterate quickly. The opportunity to meet and talk directly with the teams from Terracotta and Fiorana has given me some new insights and information and actually dispelled some misconceptions I had about their products. The new features that I saw demonstrated that are coming in Java JDK 7 and in projects like Jigsaw (to modularise the JDK7), will be very welcome. My one suggestion to Sun would be to consider reworking the draconian EULA for something they announced this week – but beyond that, I can’t comment… not very open if you ask me,” added Meeks.
Welcome to Twitter Kelvin – and thanks for all your opinions and comments.
The “politest PR person who I completely ignored all week award” goes to Alison Mickey who looks after the previously mentioned Terracotta – a company who had clearly invested in a decent show presence and, like a few others I imagine, had to politely bow down to the fact that there were other headlines being made which probably overshadowed their own. Had I had time to cover them I would have no doubt tried to use my exposure to DBA-related development tasks to comment on the worth of the company’s infrastructure layer that they claim makes scalability easier for custom development jobs associated with expanding application capacity.
A partner built platform solution from Terracotta with VMware is centred around on-demand provisioning of applications to try and guarantee resource capacity for application SLAs. This also touches server containment for parallel development cycles on shared hardware and encompasses change management technologies too – I guess that’s why their first adjective was ‘scalability’ – I’ve edited so many out all last week that that one slipped in OK? Terracotta’s web site says that, “An upcoming series of webcasts, whitepapers and conference seminars will provide customers with practical guidelines they can use to tame complexity and costs associated with managing Java applications.” So that’s good – community resources for developers are generally always a positive so I’ll drop a link in here for your reference.
I could go on and on – but I’ll just mention one more. ZeroTurnaround (again as referenced above) may have possibly the least catchy company name but one of the most developer level technologies being showcased all week. The company’s JavaRebel is a JVM plugin that it claims will enable developers to see changes to their code immediately, without the need to redeploy an application or perform a container restart. Oh alright it’s catchy, I’m just being mean.
So you see, many really interesting companies didn’t even get a mention. Other press will have covered them elsewhere in places I imagine, but Sun of course stole the show this year more than ever. Perhaps in some way if I give one or two partners a mention here it will help in some small way to keep the Java ecosystem alive and fuel its development in the same spirit as seen to date. That must surely be a good thing and I hope you will agree with me.