Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

What are Oracle's plans for Java and the JVM?

"Insider: Oracle has lost interest in Java" - http://www.infoworld.com/article/2987529/java/insider-oracle...

"The email, sent to InfoWorld on Tuesday by a former high-ranking Java official, claimed to feature details from inside Oracle. It said the company was becoming a cloud company, competing with Salesforce, and 'Java has no interest to them anymore.' The subject line cited 'Java -- planned obsolescence.'"

"Oracle’s “planned obsolescence” for Java" - https://jaxenter.com/oracle-and-javas-planned-obsolescence-1...

'Oracle is cutting back on Java EE...it[Oracle] does not want to allow other companies to help out on the Java platform. Proprietary product work will be done using the Java app server WebLogic, and there will also be a proprietary microservices platform. The email also dashes any hopes of Oracle collaborating on a ‘Java foundation’ with other companies, let alone ever relinquishing its ‘ownership’ of the Java platform.'

To cite Brian Goetz (Java language architect) [1]: "It is totally in Oracle's self-interest for Java to remain vibrant. We have billions of lines of Java code. We have tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue from Java-based products. We employ 10-15 thousand Java developers. If Java were to become irrelevant we wouldn't be able to hire new developers, we would have to pay a lot of money to retrain those developers, we would have to rewrite billions of lines of code. Much better to make sure that Java remains a productive platform for development. And if it happens to benefit the rest of the world that's collateral damage."

[1]: https://youtu.be/Dq2WQuWVrgQ?t=56m14s

Oracle's plans for Java and the JVM are pretty open:

• In Java 9 modularise the platform, add a static linker, support new JIT compiler plugins with an advanced new compiler (Graal) as the first user, a whole other bunch of things.

• In Java 10 add value types, better generics, local type inference to the Java language, possibly a replacement for JNI/native code usage (Project Panama), a bunch of other things.

There are quite a lot of plans for Java actually, considering that it's not a profit center for Oracle.

From what I hear the JVM still has a funded team at Oracle. It's Java EE that has been put in the fridge. See fi this article on the upcoming Graal vm: https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69#.9...

Java EE is back. Oracle reversed course recently. I'm on mobile so I can't find the soyrce but if you browse /r/java you can read about it. They were thinking about killing EE for their own proprietary platform which backfired.

SE isn't going anywhere. Personally I'm a JVM developer but I really don't care too much about EE.

Seems funny, considering Amazon's cloud is (as I understand it) heavily backed by Java. If there's a cloud to aspire to be, that's the one.

... And much of the rest of the code written these days: https://github.com/blog/2047-language-trends-on-github

If we're talking about the JVM, we must also include Clojure, Scala, Groovy, and any other JVM language code that would be killed if the JVM died.

If we're talking about the language, then the majority of Android and its app ecosystem are included.

Most importantly, don't forget that Java the specification is an open standard with dozens of runtime implementations and 7 compilers (not counting Google's). And the primary compiler, Sun's javac is GPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compilers#Java_compile...

Let's not oversell that.

There are maybe in total 2 compilers out there which are still usable (i. e. not 10 years out of date and unmaintained).

The specification is "open" in the sense that you can't build your own implementation of Java without accepting a proprietary licensing agreement with Oracle (assuming you even get one).

The latter is not correct. You can do it and people have.

That's wrong. Feel free to present an example.

Android is one obvious example. GNU Classpath is another. Avian is another.

Sorry, but no. None of them can passed the JCK, which is a requirement to certify a Java implementation.

Your original statement was you can't BUILD an implementation without getting Oracle's blessing. Now you've switched to saying you can't CERTIFY which is a different claim.

I understand that you are trying to play semantics here, but in this case it doesn't work.

You can't BUILD an implementation of Java, because "Java" is defined by "passes the Java conformance tests".

You can build "something", but it won't be Java, so don't call it Java. Even Google understood that.

When comparing Java to C#, planned obsolescence is an appropriate euphemism.

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