Weiqi Gao's Observations - google tag

Oracle Sues Google Over Android

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:23:50 GMT

Oh boy! Is this real?

San Francisco Chronicle:

(08-12) 17:17 PDT Redwood Shores, Calif. (AP) --

Oracle Corp. said Thursday it has filed a patent and copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google Inc.

Oracle said in a statement that Google's Android system for mobile phones infringes on its patented Java technology.

This is the other shoe dropping in a story I reported 1221 days ago:

Java: The Third Fork From Sun

Here's an excerpt of a couple of comments from that post:

Re: Java: The Third Fork From Sun

Comment from Stefano on April 13, 2007 2:53:41 AM CDT #

Are you sure that it won't prevent ASF to release Harmony under the Harmony name without references to Java/JVM ?

As far as I understood it you are not granted patent licensing if you don't pass the JCK, so, I guess you are wrong in that statement.

Re: Java: The Third Fork From Sun

Comment from Weiqi Gao on April 13, 2007 7:53:08 AM CDT #

I'm speculating that Sun will not make any patent actions against Harmony even though the letter of the spec allows them that option. The PR backlash for such a thing would be unbearable.

A precedence of this sort of a situation is the relationship between Microsoft and Mono.

Things may play out differently, though.

Is this the end of Java as we know it?

Google Chrome Operating System

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:21:43 GMT

(Via the Wall Street Journal.)

Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director, Google: It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Oh, boy. An operating system that's small, fast-booting, and for a single application. What a concept.

Don't know how to react yet. Here's some random observations and thoughts:

The blog entry was posted on 7/07/2009 09:37:00 PM, why so late at night?
I got the news from an email alert from a traditional newspaper. Not on the web. Not from twitter or any blog posts.
The first question that comes to my mind after reading the blog is Who? I'm always infinitely more interested in that part of the question than anything else, as demonstrated here 1523 days ago.
I still have a PC operating system on three floppies. I run it inside qemu or VirtualBox
This is good news for the people who have to do tech support work for their relatives. Just tell them to press the hard reset button to put everything back to factory settings.
Who will announce the discovery of the first virus in the wild for GCOS? My bet is Symantec.
I want one!
Why?
Because it's Google. And it will be cool. A new windowing system, who wouldn't want that.
A new windowing system? We haven't had one of those for years. Does it support WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW?
Could it be a replay of the PC story all over again? You know, your young IT staffer yells at the PHB: "We should henceforth do all of our development for the GCOS. Look at me, I did my application in fifteen minutes."
But what about Java?

The JVM Is Not The Center Of The Universe!

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:00:00 GMT

If you follow the Java blogs and tweets in the last couple of years, you've heard the argument that the Java vitual machine is where the value of the Java platform is, and Java the language is mrely one language among many languages that allows programmers to write frameworks, libraries, and applications for the JVM.

And according to the stories, the race, of the alternative JVM languages—including Groovy, Scala, JRuby, Jython, Clojure, and others—to become the Java.next is on, and Scala is winning it, if the Java Posse is to be believed.

It is therefore not surprising that in the latest episode of the podcast, JavaPosse #262: The Week Of Controversies, Dick Wall raised the point that Google is leveraging Java in a different way:

Dick Wall [7:39—8:59]: Google has invested a lot of effort into doing Java language centric work. So Android compiles Java to Dalvik executable format. GWT takes Java and compiles it to JavaScript where it runs in various browser environments. And Google App Engine takes Java source code and runs it on a targeted subset of Java SE, minus some features like threads, background processing, and some of the core classes.

So it seems like Google is centered on the Java language. Now this is my point: Of all the Java landscape right now, the Java language is the least interesting to me, important for sure. But honestly why are they centered on Java the language and not Java the platform or more importantly Java the community. That just seems like a crazy thing to be concentrated on.

Java at this point feels like a language which is going into maintenance mode. Why this Java obsession? I think they are missing the much much more important parts of the overall Java landscape, which is the Java platform and the Java community.

And I can't get why they are so focused on the language. It's like they don't seems to get the other parts of Java right now, the more important parts of Java.

A debate ensued both in the podcast and in the JavaPosse Google Group:

While I agree with Dick that the Java platform (by which I assume he means the JVM plus the APIs) is a compelling one to develop and deploy applications, I don't share his puzzlement about the way Google uses Java the language to target platforms other than the Java platform (Dalvik, DOM, GAE, etc.).

One reason Dick gave for paying less attention to Java the language is that large scale innovation seems to have stopped for Java the language. However, that could be a very good reason for teams like those inside Google to adopt the language. After looking at all the alternative languages I mentioned above, my sense is that Java is still the undisputed easy-to-grok, easy-to-write, easy-to-read, and easy-to-maintain language among them all. Given the resources Google has, it is natural for them to experiment with targeting Java the language on different platforms. The era of the thou shall not separate the language, the virtual machine and the API has long gone. And the irony is that that policy has severely limited the reach of Java, as I blogged 810 days ago.

I believe the general Java scene is too much intoxicated in the belief that The JVM's the One True Virtual Machine!. It may seem that way from some perspective. However the history of computing teaches us that there is no One True Thing^™. Eventually, some of the less mature VMs will catch up with the JVM. And two or three, or even four, of them will dominate the computing scene for some time. By then, the single VM languages will look silly. Groovy and Scala are particularly in danger. Python, with its Jython, IronPython, and python-parrot implementations will win the day.

I see Java the language jumping out of the JVM sea and reaching the land of the lesser known but equally promising runtime environment as a crucial step for the survival of Java.

In case you don't know, Java the language already runs on the .NET platform, as well as the native (amd64, sparc, etc.) platforms.

The JVM may seem to be the center of the universe to some. But it really isn't. And it's Achilles' Heel is the topic of another post. Stay tuned...