Athen -
athen at javaworld .com

You did an excellent job summarizing the article; much better than I attempted to do before the JL community turned rabid

Thanks for the insight and pushing the conversation forward. I think if people ignore this and sit around with smiles assuming Java wins everything, they’ll be unpleasantly surprised in 5 years when the market (driven by the enterprise vendors) takes a hard right into a realm we didn’t anticipate.

http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/1887

Regards -

Athen O’Shea
Editor, JavaWorld

I do fully expect Spring to get considerably more aggressive over the next 2 years trying to grab their piece of the server market. Their currently income is from consulting, so their IDE offering will be used to hook people into the “Way of the Spring/Jedi”, but beyond that… I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised by a server acquisition (MortBay/Jetty?).

Very interesting stuff to discuss.

Of course being one of the most “LAMP” centered shops, they could appeal to Sun from their MySQL perspective.

Something I cannot say if they’ll keep it on the other hand. Their focus you mentioned above is a bit vague on that, but clearly as a “Platform” I’d say it is a hidden gem (maybe not the Holy Grail, but even Grails isn’t the whole meal for real IT projects, it is merely a rapid POC tool to impress some execs in a hurry for Sun if they are smart enough to keep it?

I have on my New Years resolution sheet for this year: “Be smarter next year”, so we’ll see if 2009 is any different.

Werner, I really have no idea. Sun is *really* persistent when it comes to their NetBeans offering, and there are still a slew of independent IDE companies out there.

For a while I thought for political reasons that Sun would never acknowledge the Eclipse camp, but I think they are testing the waters of “acceptance” with the OSGi+Glassfish move… indirectly.

I just think in the long term you cannot ignore the power of the Eclipse ecosystem, at some point Sun will move their tools ontop of it… I’d be willing to put $1k on that. I don’t mean this year or maybe even next, but at *some point* they will. We saw Oracle do it and we saw BEA do it… heck we even saw JBuilder/CodeGear do it.

I think two years ago you could make the argument that if you were a big enough company, you could make a platform/toolset comparable to Eclipse, but it’s glaring now the amount of stuff you get for free building on Eclipse. The entry point is so much higher, the value so much higher that is *really hard* to argue for reinvention of the wheel anymore.

For example, the Sun team was restructuring code in NetBeans 5.x and I believe all the way up to 6.x to handle how IDE tasks could be fired off in the background and not block the UI for periods of time. They also rewrote the entire source code parsing infrastructure in 6.x.

How much did all *that* cost? Neither of those tasks are trivial, so figure a senior level salary, and I know the parser was atleast a year of work and god knows how much more work for maintenence and enhancements… so say 2-300k for all that work and all that QA and all those bug fixes… they would have gotten all that out of the box with Eclipse.

Now I’m not saying NetBeans is bad, I’m just saying the value of re-solving the same problems over and over, that a platform used by like 10k companies have already solved the hell out of, has no value to it. It makes less and less sense for Sun to burn so much money on platform concerns in NetBeans instead of tooling targetted towards their server and hardware platforms.

I did notice something *damn* interesting recently, on the NetBeans download page (here: http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.5/rc/) the structuring for the pre-configured download packages are already targeting entire platforms like PHP, C, Ruby and Java.

If Sun’s future lies in Ruby and it seems they are pretty serious about it with JRuby surging forward and from what I’m seeing big support all around from Sun for it (VM and Tools), then they’ll probably make a move and buy a company like Aptana.

If there isn’t big-iron money in Ruby yet, and Sun’s revenue is still coming strong from their servers being sold with the Glassfish stack and Java EE spec-compliant apps (or big Spring apps or whatever), then I think a Java EE centric IDE would make more sense.

Hell… buy both, integrate them, and dominate the market… they could do that I guess too.

I cannot say, if Eclipse Babel also requires English Language Champions, but should you consider it, I’ll ask our team lead whether he needs some help there ?;-)

@Riyad: you’re not talking about Sun possibly buying MyEclipse/Genuitec maybe ?!;-)

Cheers,
Werner

Loose: not tight or securely attached
Lose: to misplace or suffer loss

I guess “ruined” is a strong word… maybe “changed the shit out of” or “permanently restructured what you could make money at in the tools market”. It went from being single-purpose tools to the more ethereal “value” that you wanted to pay for… and that could be just about anything.

You are absolutely right about NetBeans, it’s a cost center and Sun has been slowly moving resources off of it as time goes on. It’s only purpose is to serve as honey along the rim of the “funnel” that Sun plans on drawing people down, eventually ending in server hardware, and unfortunately for Sun it’s clear that Eclipse is where it’s at. Not starting a war, just that NetBeans/Sun can’t compete with the energy behind Eclipse. At some point NetBeans will be shelved or run in maintenance mode.

I’d expect Sun to buy an Eclipse tools company and restructure what their tool > server > os > hardware stack looks like. Maybe at that point they’ll pick their own mascot-language to tout… maybe JavaFX? Who knows.

Thanks for the comments Werner, always good to talk about this stuff with someone.

What you said to have failed for Ajax is something which more or less happened in the area of those tools. Hardly anybody with a sane mind will work a fully blown IDE nowadays. NetBeans still exists of course, but I cannot say whether Sun is able to afford its support after dropping other tools much longer? “Giving in” on the OSGi front looks like coming to reason probably because of economic issues making a fight for different standards and numbering schemes a bit pointless and hard to sit out…

Oracle is the only major vendor still locked-in with JDeveloper. A dinosaur with roots from JBuilder 2 where nothing significant has been done except plugins or extensions for Oracle built around it. Strange that all the refurbishing and straining keep-alive of this White Elephant keeps on, but Oracle can afford it even in times where they might loose to cheaper vendors on various fronts.

Should the shares fall further, even Sun could become a candidate for SpringSource to purchase some day, but I’m not sure, if they would dare all the hardware related stuff Sun’s got? Obviously a true Open Source company might benefit them if Sun ever really was on sale. BEA was clearly overpriced compared to now, but again Oracle will survive it. Maybe Larry Ellison might have to call of another Yacht being built?;-)

Ajax is a good example of a missed opportunity; no one grabbed it by the horns and made it theirs and then dictated a standard across the community, so we have no less than 113 AJAX frameworks now.

I’m not saying they *should* have, organic growth can be awesome, just stating that if someone were able to wrestle it to the ground in the early days that probably would have gotten them a lot of control over the direction to take it.

I think that is what we are seeing with the surge of interest in dynamic languages, we have camps building up around a few select languages and then companies stepping in and grabbing up the camps to control them and shape how they move forward, hoping they grabbed the right one.

This doesn’t work unless you control enough mindshare to drive an idea forward, but everyone mentioned in this article owns enough mindshare, consulting contracts and resources to make that happen with whatever they choose… so I’ll be really interested in seeing what happens.

This might also lead to a fragmentation of sorts in the sweeping “Java Development” group, but not in the pure sense… in the sense of “This is what I do on Java”.

Still too early to tell, I just know that what used to be a very black and white “This is Java development” situation is now a very Grey “My Java IDE has dev tools for like 9 different languages now…”

Commercial developers (not open source/hardcore geniuses) are already sick of all the noise, so as soon as one of these folks can consolidate the best approach of all this mess down into a single proprietary stack, tied with tools and a server solution… that’ll be the beginning of it.

I full expect Spring Source to make a server purchase or move in the server space in the next year or so; maybe longer if the Groovy purchase fails. They want that server space as much as anyone else.

servers == hardware == lock-in == huge contracts

Tools were ruined by Eclipse, hard to make money on them any more… can’t make money on operating systems anymore… the only thing left is the support contracts and the hardware solutions.