Weiqi Gao's Observations - oracle 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?

Java, Sun, Oracle, ...

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:16:34 GMT

This has been an eventful week in the tech world. Two events stood out: one is an upbeat look into the future—of PC-less computing/entertaining with Apple's new iPad; one is a painful look back at some once also world-alteringly-new technologies from Sun—having found a new home at Oracle.

The Sun/Oracle news hits closer to home.

If you haven't been paying attention to all the accounts in the press and in blogs, all you have to do is to visit http://www.sun.com/ to realize that the world has changed.

I'm grateful to Oracle for its announced strategies for Java, JavaFX, OpenOffice, etc.

For Java, it would seem that it will be business as usual. In answering a question at the event, Larry Ellison essentially said that "Oracle is making money with Java" with it's middleware products and applications, so the pressure to make money off of Sun's Java products is an non-issue.

Oracle will also invest heavily in JavaFX. Jim Weaver has a more detailed account on that front:

Jim Weaver: In the live Oracle/Sun Strategy webcast, I heard encouraging statements like:

We will invest heavily in JavaFX

Significant investment will be made in JavaFX; focus on designers; fusion of DHTML, JavaScript, Java, JavaFX

The JavaPosse spells out the JavaScript link to JavaFX more succinctly in Episode #295:

Tor (17:07): JavaFX appears to have a rosy future. They said they would invest in it aggressively. It's going to be developed across all platforms, including embedded. And they also announced that there are plans to make SceneGraph access available from JavaScript.
Carl: Very cool.
Tor: That's been one of the criticisms for people who haven't learned JavaFX the language. You don't want to learn the new language. You don't see the point, right. So the idea here is that you can still take advantage of the APIs in the SceneGraph, even from JavaScript.
Carl: That's wild. That really gives it an advantage over all of the competition.

If you come here for the Friday quiz instead of all of the above, here's one:

Q: In which language is the following program written? Who invented the language? Will it compile? Run without errors? What does it print?

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}

Larry Ellison: Committed To JavaFX

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:41:33 GMT

It's been several days since I came back from JavaOne 2009. This is my first JavaOne. Since the keynotes were streamed live, and the twitter stream were constantly being updated by so many people, I did not feel the urge to blog about it at the conference. I did a couple of tweets.

This blog entry is mostly for my friends and colleagues who did not go to JavaOne this year and who did not follow the various news and blog feeds. Answers to the "Hey, Weiqi, you are back. How's JavaOne?" I get in the hallway.

Oracle Endorses JavaFX

Any lingering doubts I had about Oracle's attitudes towards JavaFX were resolved on the Tuesday keynote address, in which Larry Ellison, the next leader of the Java community according to Scott McNealy, praised JavaFX by name:

Larry Ellison (7 minutes into Chapter 5): I've been meeting with different groups inside of Sun, and one of the things we are looking forward to is seeing libraries coming out of the OpenOffice group that are JavaFX based. So I think inside of Sun we would like to see accelerated development based on this exciting new platform, Java with FX, which now allows us, thank you very much James, (for) no more Ajax tools. A lot of suffering programmers will pray for you for the rest of their lives, because they don't have to program Ajax anymore.

Going to JavaFX is going to allow us to build fantastic UIs in Java. And we hope, we are going to encourage the OpenOffice group quickly to build their version of a spreadsheet and a word processor using JavaFX.

So we are very committed to see JavaFX exploited throughout Oracle and throughout Sun.

Meeting People

Meeting people is one of the reasons I went to JavaOne this year. And boy did I meet people!

First off, I met the coauthors of the Pro JavaFX Platform, Jim Weaver (aka JavaFXpert), Stephen Chin (aka Steve on Java), and Dean Iverson (aka Pleasing Software). The four of us presented the JavaFX course at Java University on Monday. I also attended Stephen and Jim's technical session based on the book. The printed book will come out in a few weeks.

I also got to meet these people: Josh Marinacci, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts, Chris Campbell, Amy Fowler, Brian Beck, Brian Goetz, Jai Suri, Neal Gafter, Joshua Bloch, Tor Norby, Jeff Brown, Guillaume Laforge, Graeme Rocher, Dierk Koenig, Jonathan Giles, Carl Dae, Stuart Marks, Jeff Martin, Peter Pilgrim, Geertjan Wielanga, Andres Almiray, Danno Ferrin, Chet Haase, Eric Bruno, Jim Clarke, Gail and John Anderson, and more. It's nice to meet people face-to-face. Nicer still when they say: "I read your blog" or "I read your article" or "The name rings a bell. You are the ..." Thank you.

Java 7

The big story on the Java 7 front is

The CLASSPATH is dead.

How so? Through the new work that is being done with modularity in Project Jigsaw.

On the JVM side there is JSR 292 invokedynamic bytecode. The story there is that the JVM is multi-lingual and will be home to all sorts of languages. Scala and Groovy had very strong presence.

And then there is Project Coin—small changes (slides).

I think it's been long enough from the debates that I can say without getting emotional that closure and reified generics won't be in Java 7. Maybe they really do want us to use those other languages on the JVM that have closures.

But, in honor of the original Java 7 feature list, which I blogged 1455 days (that's almost four years) ago, let me just say XML literals and move out of the way... You may now throw rocks.

Cloud Computing

I'm completely green in this area, but even I picked up some of the cloud computing vibe at Moscone Center. The Sun cloud and Google App Engine for Java were the most prominent. This blog is served by a collection of servlets running on my home machine. I imagine from a cost saving perspective, it would make sense to host it on the Google cloud.

I did go to the Google App Engine BOF and asked the question about obstacles for porting existing web apps to Google App Engine. The short answer is that file system access, data storage, and threading restrictions are the major obstacles. A longer, more philosophical answer is that one should not think of Google App Engine as "another Java hosting service" but rather a highly scalable machine managed by Google that happens to be programmable in Java.

The Toy Show (And The Show Toy)

The James Gosling toy show was fun to watch. Although none of the featured acts strike as super cool, The JavaFX Designer Tool that Tor Norby demoed did inspire awe from the audience.

Aside from its utility (think InterfaceBuilder for the Mac) for designers of JavaFX application when it is released by the end of 2009, I think another message, subliminal though it may be, is that JavaFX can be used for serious applications now.

The Java Store that is also previewed at the show reinforces that message, as do other presentations that demonstrated the use of JavaFX in their applications (I missed the talk by Dierk Koenig about JavaFX + Groovy = Beauty + Productivity, but the Geertjan has blogged about it on JavaLobby).

This year's JavaOne show device is the HTC Touch Diamond phone that is selling for $219 at the JavaOne store. It is a pretty usable device that has JavaFX pre-installed. Come to my cube tomorrow (or go to the St. Louis JUG tomorrow evening) and I'll show it to you.

That's some of my impressions of JavaOne this year. I'll post some JavaFX specific thoughts and pointers in future blog entries. Now that the book is almost done, I can resume my regular blog posting pace.