Former Oracle employee, via acquisition. Horrible place to work.
This post is my own opinion and does not relflect insider or confidential information from Oracle.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/j...
MSI's are just safer/simpler/easier to test/easier to deploy. The fact that they hide it is pretty unforgivable.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/inde...
Apple has stopped including Java in OS X and banned Java in the AppStore.
Mac OS X is the only major consumer operating system that comes complete with a fully configured and ready-to-use Java runtime and development environment. Professional Java developers are increasingly turning to the feature-rich Mac OS X as the operating system of choice for both Mac-based and cross-platform Java development projects. Mac OS X includes the full version of J2SE 1.5, pre-installed with the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the HotSpot virtual machine (VM), so you don't have to download, install, or configure anything.
Deploying Java applications on Mac OS X takes advantage of many built-in features, including 64-bit support, resolution independence, automatic support of multiprocessor hardware, native support for the Java Accessibility API, and the native Aqua look and feel. As a result, Java applications on Mac OS X look and perform like native applications on Mac OS X.
[0] http://wayback.archive.org/web/20091223033016/http://develop...
you can still include your own JRE.
Oddly, Oracle provide a tool to create a DMG with a .app inside that has a bundled inside. It's very easy to use. Doing this means your users don't need to install Java themselves anymore. Seems like the left hand cutting off the revenue stream of the right hand, but hey, I'm not complaining.
Only half-joking -- I'm not sure it has any real desktop application mindshare, though I don't know much about what people run on their Macs.
* You will take the corporate standard laptop and like it.
* You will take the corporate standard screen and like it.
* You will take the one corporate standard virtual machine you are allocated and like it.
* Everything moves slowly, even for a corporate bureaucracy.
* None of the above applies to Sales - they can have whatever they want whenever they want, including brand new MacBook Pros yearly. (That says a lot about priorities)
* Stack-ranking system that tries to force managers to give 1/3 of the team bad rankings every year. In theory the top 1/3 are supposed to get bonuses/options, but in practice managers just spread the pain around so even as a top-performer I got screwed.
* Pay used to be kinda average, but now that the wage fixing cartel was shut down and wages have risen it makes Oracle look hilariously low.
* Lots of mandates from on high about what technologies to use
* Above mentioned technologies are heavily designed by architecture astronauts; if it makes the install 8 GB and take 15 hours all the better to push customers to consulting services. Lots of XXXFactory classes and useless abstractions.
* Be forced to tell a customer you can't restore your copy of their database to test with because ProdDev IT won't give you NAS space to store it (not that it would be fast enough to be usable anyway)
* Everything interesting or good for customers will get massive pushback; the focus is on checkboxes that CTOs can understand
* Manager turf wars and pompous blowhards abound, all looking to carve out a nice little kingdom to lord over.
It's a place to go earn a basic salary until you retire. After the acquisition, everything got much worse.
If your company is acquired by Oracle, plan your exit strategy and stay just long enough to cash out whatever options you have.
If a company you rely on is acquired by Oracle, look for an alternative immediately. They will eventually strangle you, even unintentionally just by neglect. Never put yourself in the position of relying on Oracle unless you're on the Fortune 1000 list.
Again, all my personal opinion and does not rely on any confidential or non-public information. I was just a developer and have no knowledge of strategic decisions at Oracle.
This seems like the sort of polished addendum you'd write if you're used to having to say it over and over and over again. Do you just have this saved as a text expander snippet and use it in all your posts?
My large corp experience is that you are expected to paste a similar disclaimer on all external communications, during your employment, where your employment with that company is relevant to the conversation - explicitly such as above, or even implicitly.
The only place I see this not done is on mailing lists, where your corporate allegiance is more or less expected.
After you've had this bashed over your head a few times, it's just standard cruft to append.
Ah, and yes: it is an awful place to work. For the same reason: they don't care about anything but money... Employees are COGs, nothing more, nothing less. If you find the right niche, you can live a quiet salaried life there for some years, btw... like probably in any other giant company.
This is really tragic, since the Java language and VM are nice pieces of technology. Unfortunately Oracle is killing them. I'd never use them for a new project now.
So while Java managed to fix its reputation itself, Oracle is doing everything in their power to break it again.
Why not? There's a tool called javapackager that makes a self contained app install for Linux, Mac, Windows that doesn't require the user to install the JRE, if you're doing desktop projects. For servers this stuff is irrelevant anyway.
Java is mostly open source too, so if you wanted to make your own system JRE installer setup, I guess you could (though OpenJDK isn't identical to the Oracle JRE).