“IBM can’t scale, they can’t do clusters, can’t do clouds”… “Oracle is taking the same strategy as IBM”… Of course the first statement was made on IBM’s DB2 (not the mainframe one) and the second one was referencing IBM’s strategy that it took back in 1960s, but still the combination of these two sounds as a joke. And Larry loves joking. He couldn’t go to iPad presentation because of his obligations to give a speech at the Oracle + Sun Product Strategy event. He didn’t miss much though. While neighboring bloggers are supposedly preparing an in-depth analysis of the “industry-changing event” that happened yesterday I will just point out the main items that seemed interesting to me as a Java/OpenSource guy. In general presenters went through all of the Oracle/Sun technologies and underlined the main idea: INTEGRATION. Oracle will definitely spend a lot of effort integrating stuff. It will probably take one year to get somewhere. First of all JRockit is going to be integrated with HotSpot. When JRockit first appeared it had lots of innovative ideas. For one – it had a built-in support for AOP (AspectWerkz). Lets hope that JRockit can still provide some added value for the good old HotSpot. Future of JavaEE is modularity based on Open Standards. Does it sound like OSGi? Not sure. Unifying JavaME and JavaSE. This sounds weird to me. JavaME is something that is being used in millions (or billions?) of devices, but I really doubt that it can evolve into something special. I think that this ‘unification’ will mostly be adaptation of useful parts ME provides into SE to let ME rest in piece in favor of FX. It was also strange to see how JavaFX was positioned for the current mobile market, as to my knowledge there are no commercial devices running JavaFX to date. NetBeans will be positioned as a lightweight IDE for the open source community, JDeveloper – IDE for enterprise customers. At the same time Oracle plans to continue investing in Eclipse. Clearly something is wrong with that — you can’t support three competing products at the same time. Linux was referenced a lot. Larry is a Linux fan, and so are his colleagues — there’s no doubt. ZFS was referenced a lot as one of the most powerful filesystems (it can do snapshots), I really hope that Linux fans will be able to truly enjoy ZFS on Linux kernel level because as of now it works so slowly via Fuse (Filesystem in Userspace). Oracle is going to produce a Web-based Office suite based on OpenOffice.org. This reminds me of Google and the line of its online office tools that it managed to sell to CA government. If Larry’s protege will become the next CA governor who knows whose office tools CA will use then. OracleVM is so much better than VMWare. I personally never tried it so I can’t tell, but will do a test run sometime soon. The thing that sounded really awesome to me was the plan to make VirtualBox images deployable to OracleVM. I’ve been using VirtualBox for quite some time for my testing purposes and I really missed this functionality — being able to put VirtualBox image to production. EDIT: OracleVM appears to be Xen which I tried a couple of years ago and got frustrated with. While waiting for Larry’s speech I was surprised by Sun logo continuously put above Oracle’s in all video clips during the break — will it stay like that? Then he came. Thanks God he was not on a skateboard or roller skates. He also didn’t have a tie and didn’t talk about ROI, TCO etc. He seemed to be a golden mean between a Google-typed and an IBM-typed guy. Larry clearly didn’t like the term ‘cloud’. He claims that Oracle is taking the strategy that IBM took in 1960s. This statement really scared me because the same strategy will lead to the same dead-end and a $%&*&^ software. The most important thing is that he claims that rumors about layoffs in Sun is ‘garbage’ and they will hire another 2000 in the coming months. We’ll see sometime soon how they are going to do that. The scenario that everyone is afraid of is dismissal of Sun’s local development centers and hiring of thousands in their single dev center in India. This scenario fits well into what Larry stated regarding the new hirings. Larry really doubts that SAP will chose Oracle products as a middleware for their installations. Even despite the fact that SAP uses Oracle as a database for their most critical installations. That’s it for now. The event was very positive in general, but still some questions left unanswered. Software Development