SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has been fawning all over Sun Microsystems Inc. technologies lately, such as Java, the Solaris OS, the MySQL database, and the SPARC CPU platform. But it still remains to be seen how Oracle will deal with redundancies in the Java enterprise application server and IDE spaces once Sun becomes part of Oracle.
The merger between the two companies currently is pending. At the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference in San Francisco on Monday, Oracle promoted planned advancements in the WebLogic application server platform it inherited from its 2008 acquisition of BEA systems, involving modularization and support of OSGi technology.
(On Tuesday, Oracle’s Ellison and Sun’s Scott McNealy vowed that Sun’s technologies would live on post-merger. Also at OpenWorld, Oracle highlighted its efforts to integrate technology it has acquired recently.)
Shortly thereafter, in another OpenWorld presentation, James Gosling, a Sun vice-president considered the father of Java, hailed Sun’s own open source GlassFish application server. “The adoption of Glassfish is pretty amazing,” Gosling said. Deployments have taken place all over the world, and the technology is used for mission-critical systems, he said, noting that “it’s running at about a million downloads a month.”
Gosling also touted the NetBeans IDE Monday, which rivals the Eclipse IDE that has been backed by Oracle. Additionally, Oracle has its own JDeveloper IDE. Gosling called NetBeans a top-of-the-line IDE and said he was “a huge NetBeans fan.”
Asked if he was concerned about Oracle’s commitment to NetBeans and Glassfish, Gosling deferred to Oracle. “I have no data one way or the other,” Gosling said.
Modularization of the application server platform is being pondered in a project called WebLogic DM (Dynamic Modules). The point would be to modularize the core of the application server so functionality could be built on top of it, Farrell said. OSGI, according to Oracle officials, offers benefits in that it is small, fast and mature, is service-oriented and has multi-environment support. The microkernel-based DM technology is eyed for release in 2010 or 2011.
The company, however, has run into issues with providing tooling for DM, according to Oracle officials. Security also is an issue. The DM technology would not replace the existing application server.
