hemju » Sun Microsystems

JRuby finds a new home at Engine Yard

Helmut M. Juskewycz — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:09:57 +0000

Engine Yard (EY) is a enterpricy (serious support and hosting, but pricy) Rails hosting service. Two months ago at the JavaOne, Engine Yard announced that they will support JRuby. Since then a lot changed, Oracle bought Sun which raised a lot of questions about Sun’s products and frankly I don’t think it looks good for a couple of products. The endangered product list so far: NetBeans, MySQL, JavaFX (despite Larry Ellison commitment), Solaris, and side products like JRuby. Due to some legal reasons, all this is just speculation and no official announcements have been made yet. However, this uncertainty doesn’t help and so many developers and Sun employees are worried. As a consequence of this uncertainty, the JRuby guys left Sun (Oracle) and joined Engine Yard. Charles Nutter, one of the JRuby guys, said: “To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn’t support JRuby, but we also didn’t have any evidence that they would. Two out of the three developers making this move have families; we want to make sure JRuby will get to the next level, and we had to make a decision.”

I consider this very good news. Engine Yard has always been a very strong force behind Ruby and Rails. They already employ a bunch of very good developers and now they got themselves a bunch of geniuses more. This not only means that JRuby future looks bright, no, it is shining. Thanks JRuby guys and Engine Yard!

As a side note, Nick Sieger is leaving Project Kenai (another product with an uncertain future I guess) and returning to JRuby full time. Ola Bini is still working on JRuby at ThoughtWorks.

Source:

Sun’s JRuby team jumps ship to Engine Yard

Lingui.st - Online Resource Editor, Manage your Ruby/Rails, Java, .Net and C++ language files with ease

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Sun (Oracle) going to launch a Java App Store!

Helmut M. Juskewycz — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:42:17 +0000

App Stores are the new trend, Apple kinda started it and others are following, e.g. Google Android. Guess who is next? Java! Like every real star Java is a little bit late to the party, but the potential is huge. Let me explain why …

Jonathan Schwarz, Sun’s CEO,writes that at JavaOne a new project, probably called Java Store (working title “Project Vector”), will be revealed. He writes about including the Google (although Google is not directly mentioned) toolbar in the Java installation process and how Sun made a bunch of money with it. Sun now wants to extend this concept and to distribute all kinds of third party applications via the Java update mechanism. Java is widely spread and installed on over a billion devices, hence, a huge potential customer base already exists. At the moment facts are rare, as far as I know Jonathan’s blog post is the only source. So I guess we have to wait for JavaOne for more concrete information.

At the beginning I wrote about Apple’s and Google’s application stores. However, these I stores are for mobile devices and Java store aims at the desktop (at least at the moment, JavaFX mobile can change the picture). So my guess is Java Store will be (in the long run) more like a package management system, like APT or Ruby Gems. This would be great. Not only is Windows missing this from the beginning, if Java Store follows the write once run everywhere concept, Java Store could be expanded to Mac, Ubuntu, and so forth. Another huge advantage could be jar sharing. There are libraries which are used over and over again (e.g. Apache), with Java store the libraries could be shared between Java applications, similar to Linux application installations. Is this why Sun made its own Project Jigsaw instead of adopting OSGI?

This would be great news for users and developers. Will it happen? Probably not. I am still sceptical about the Sun/Oracle deal and Sun still has to convince developers to jump on the train (which is not a strength of Sun). Still, if it happens it could be just great.TimeWhale Time Tracking

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Oracle buys Sun!

Helmut M. Juskewycz — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:25:05 +0000

Like the title says: Oracle buys Sun. After the failed acquisition from IBM, Oracle now jumps in and buys Sun.

I am still not sure what this means to the Java world, but this is big news! However, my first thought was: what happens now to MySQL?

Some links:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16598

http://java.dzone.com/news/oracle-buys-sun

Update:

My second thought: Dies the Java client movement (JavaFX) with this deal?TimeWhale Time Tracking

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Great Tim Bray interview on the Future of the Web

Helmut M. Juskewycz — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:09:03 +0000

Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, discusses current web trends. I actually like his cautious view of RIAs (although it conflicts with Sun’s current JavaFX direction). Some highlights of the interview:

WS* is already legacy.
WS* will be more and more replaced with RESTful services
RIAs are overrated, user like simple interfaces (I totally agree on this)
JavaScript/AJAX are the new old stars of the web, especially with the new browser coming out
MultiCore isn’t much of an issue (yet) for Web Development
HTTP doesn’t need an overhaul
He isn’t sure in which direction Cloud Computing is going.

The 30-minutes interview is available on InfoQ.

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