Oracle vs Google. .NET and Mono

Miguel de Icaza (Mr. Mono) has written an excellent piece on ORCL suing GOOG over Android/Dalvik.

Oracle, as Sun, extracted $1.6bn from MSFT, and $900m of this was for patents. So we can safely assume that  Microsoft's .NET implementation is covered by this deal.

Now Miguel and  Mono folk will be crowing about how wonderful the Microsoft Patent Licence Grant is (and it is a generous gift). However, one small point: Mono is also likely to be in breach of Oracle's patents, but Microsoft do not have the rights to confer these rights to Mono.

So Mono folks - you're just as likely to get a visit from Oracle as Google, or at least you would be, if NOVL had a Market Cap 50-100 times the size of it's current woeful state.

Oracle and Sun - uninformed comment

Just like the rest of the Internet - here's some uninformed thoughts on the Oracle-Sun deal:

1. GlassFish vs WebLogic (and erstwhile OAS). I suspect that GlassFish 3 has had it from Oracle's perspective. It'll carry on as an unsupported, but great, open-source project.
2. NetBeans vs JDeveloper and Eclipse. Goodbye NetBeans. Like GlassFish it will carry on, but wither on the vine.
   
3. MySQL vs Oracle DB: Support and Sales. Well, there's some wondering in the blogosphere as to who at Sun actually works on/supports MySQL now, but, be that as it may, Oracle can now sell you (cheapish) support for MySQL. So SMBs outgrowing their roots can get infected by Oracle sales, and Enterprises can run the many MySQL-based apps.
4. MySQL vs Oracle DB: Migration and up-sell. I still expect some sort of automated MySQL to Oracle DB product, and/or a MySQL-api call into the data in an Oracle DB. Ease of Migration.
5. JVM and Java language. And the JCP. I expect Java to become more open. Why? Kudos. Looking-good. (While still selling tons of expensive WebLogic, DB, etc., etc. licences). Plus it will be good for Java (and hence Oracle).
6. That pesky hardware business. Sun's ailing hardware business is what has brought the once-huge company to it's knees. Dell and HP make perfectly good (and rather scalable) x86-64 servers. The vast majority of people do not need E25Ks. Honestly - will it be wound down - sold off to HP or even the fledgling Cisco? Or can the expensive software vendor make the case for a one-stop shop to customers? "Here, our hardware is pricey too, but you get our excellent support - all in one place"
7. Sun xVM and Oracle VM. One will stay, one will go. (Sorry - stating the obvious there).
   
8. (Open)Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). Is Solaris (Sun's other millstone) just legacy now? Does OpenSolaris really offer throughput advantages over Linux? Will ZFS become GPLd and available in Linux or a commercial addon to OEL? Does btrfs offer all of ZFS' feature set (should have researched that bit, sorry). I suspect Solaris is history, like Netbeans. In 5 years, it will be a fond memory.

The Sun is dead, long live the Oracle. Dear Oracle, please look after Sun and Java, we've had a lot of good times together, and we want it to continue.

Why all PCs need 2GB RAM

Mem: 2065992k total, 1615628k used, 450364k free, 24k buffers
Swap: 5242872k total, 1118284k used, 4124588k free, 209792k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
22034 nic 20 0 2087m 803m 26m S 0 39.8 9:52.67 java
15540 nic 20 0 375m 206m 22m S 27 10.2 93:32.82 firefox-bin

And I'd just shut down Jetty... Grails programming in Eclipse

No, not April Fools.

While I sit here, hopefully upgrading our BusinessObjects installation, I thought I'd note a few things. Things that have either been on my mind, through my mind or out of my mind.

First, let us talk of Adobe AIR, and indeed AIR for Linux. Now here's a turn up for the books, while many apps seem to be going "on to the web" and running in a browser, AIR shows us a new way. Lots of apps that can run on a desktop. No, not klunky, minimal widgets, but full featured apps that read/write to apps "out there" in web-land. Pretty, damn schweet.

Now, some smart-arses may be thinking that this is nothing new. Indeed, this is what I thought MS were going to do with .NET and Windows 6/Longhorn/Vista, when .NET was initially mooted, but no. They chickened out. Which is a shame, because the .NET runtime (a.k.a CLR), C# and VB.NET aren't bad (being MS rewrites of the JVM, Java, and er.. a .NET-ified, "it's a proper language now" version of VB, respectively). However, the Adobe AIR runtime seems a lot better at memory management than the JVM, or my limited experience of Mono's CLR implementation - this makes it more suitable for desktop-based RIAs. Maybe there aren't enough, really rich apps out there yet for AIR to tell, but I'm sold.

Talking of .NET apps: why do I run more .NET (Mono) apps on Linux than I run .NET apps on Windows? On Linux:

1. F-Spot
2. Banshee
3. Tomboy
   
4. gTwitter (although I'm using Twhirl on AIR at the mo')
   
5. beagle

On Windows XP:

1. VisualBasic 2005 Express
2. Trivial apps I've writting in VB.NET...

Talking of Mono (neat segue, here) - I've recently tried openSUSE and will be playing with SLES 10, somewhat soon. What do I think (bear in mind previous comments I've made), well the fact that GNOME is available (good job too, considering the number of GNOME/Mono experts at Novell!) and has the best interface of all GNOME versions is a boon. Being able to choose between drivers for my wireless card (unlike Ubuntu - old driver only, and Fedora - new borked driver only) was a cool addition. Things worked pretty well, and I'll blog more later in the year.

(Small interruption while BO thinks it's upgraded - let's see... Now redeploying wars...).

Mentioning .war files, I've been playing once more with Grails, now it's hit it's 1.0(.2!) release. It's a lot more polished and very, very cool. At this point in time, both Java and experienced, MVC-using PHP programmers can either choose to try (J)Ruby on Rails or Grails. Neither is perfect, but if you do bother learning one or the other your (future) productivity will rocket.

JRuby has the distinct advantage in Sun sponsorship, with Netbeans integration etc. Grails has the advantage of being written in Groovy/Java and thus you can get at all the Java classes for free. Grails also has the fine, familiar underpinnings of Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, GSP (which are so like JSP) which most Java-heads have dabbled with at least.

Groovy at least isn't particularly performant (as some recent bloggers have shown) but neither was Java all those years ago... (Unsure about Grails, which has large parts written in Java - my own apps aren't accessed often enough to tell).

It's funny how things come around: when I was a full-time postgrad (1992-6), Java 0.9 came about, but most "powerful" machines only had 32MB RAM and well-sub-100MHz CPUs. We were all LISP fans/programmers - OO stuff was used, but among the some of the faculty, Functional programming was often looked upon as some sort of god-like beauty. Now, Java 7, Groovy, Scala, ... are all closure/Functional-programming obsessed. The Art of the Meta Object Protocol will always stick in my mind because of how much a couple of people were excited by it (and it had a great cover) and look at all that lovely MOP in Groovy.

(BO upgrade/using wdeploy failed to notice previous version and duplicated entries in conf/server.xml - crap).

So either the modern computing industry is really 15 years behind theory, or... I don't know. I wonder if Order Sorted Algebra (my old field) will make it's way into modern rigorous computing! Heh.

Ah, BO is back up. All hail!

This is nic, signing off.

Maven 2

As an update to my previous rant about Maven, I updated to the dev version of the Eclipse Maven2 plug-in and noted a nifty feature I hadn't noticed before (it may have been there):

I can't remember the exact name of the option, but it was something along the lines of "Dear Maven, please stop f*cking up my dependencies and just keep to the stuff you're good at".

Sorted. My project now appears and functions like any other Eclipse project, but I can run the Maven Jetty target, etc. from the Eclipse External tools menu.

So now, I can say that Maven, in fact, rocks, and my previous post is null and void.

Wasting time

Dear Java developers,

please avoid using Maven 2 wherever possible. It's a waste of my time and yours.

Thanks for ruining an entire day of my life just trying to get a simple Struts2 project up and running.

So I'm currently stuck with two versions: a Maven project which doesn't believe in external JARs and a Struts 2 project which doesn't have the correct dependencies.

nic

InfoQ: Sun to Introduce JavaFX Mobile and JavaFX Script

InfoQ: Sun to Introduce JavaFX Mobile and JavaFX Script

At last, Sun might finally "get it".