Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-failed-how-oracle-killed-java-ee/

by omnibrain • 7 years ago

460 516 7 years ago

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Illniyar• 7 years ago

Well, mmm, good riddance? I suppose this will cause a lot of hardships to a lot of people who need to maintain JavaEE, but the fact that Java EE is no more is nothing but good. It is a nightmare case of overengineering.

DonHopkins9• 7 years ago

Time to switch to C#. Funny how it took Oracle to do what C# originally intended to do: kill Java.

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

Nice joke (apparently bad taste for the HN crowd). That said is C# really great ? come on .. they have F#, and F > C. QED

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

First C# needs to get into all the platforms where there is a Java compiler.

And a proper story for something similar to Swing, not even considering JavaFX here. There is Xamarin, but again, the platforms with Java compilers available.

And I am stating this as someone that works daily within .NET eco-system.

marak8309• 7 years ago

hand up uh not as experienced as most people on HN, what's the hate for c#? I went from vb6 to VB.net then c# and while I fully admit I'm a casual coder, i haven't had an issue (with what I do, which is voice to string primarily) so far. Is there something better for this I perhaps should look into?

james_s_tayler2• 7 years ago

I switched to C# late last year. Oracle is just too much baggage to have hanging around when thinking about your career / future for me. Really didn't like the direction they are taking things when they announced their new release train and licencing model. Compared to that Microsoft have done an about face in recent years with a commitment to open source and first-class support for Linux and revamping their core offering with .NET Core. It's been a mostly smooth transition.

threeseed9• 7 years ago

You can't be serious.

JVM is still the best platform for any type of back-end application. It has the widest array of libraries, is proven to run on any type of hardware and comes standard on every OS and every cloud instance.

.Net is a great platform and all but it still hasn't done enough to really merit switching teams. Especially when you have Scala, Kotlin, Clojure etc to pick from.

cmiles743• 7 years ago

I think every Java developer should be familiar with C# and dotNet Core. There is a lot of similarities between the languages and it will be easy for any Java developer to pick up.

smadge• 7 years ago

I never used a flow blown Java EE web application server, but the various APIs I used like JDBC, JAX-RS, and JPA were generally well thought out and pleasant enough to work with. It would be a shame if these interfaces/specifications became proprietary.

based23• 7 years ago

These specs are reuse in MicroProfile: https://wiki.eclipse.org/MicroProfile/Implementation

mbell• 7 years ago

Without knowing it you have cherry picked possibly the only good parts of Java EE. The rest that constitute a 'full blown' Java EE stack are horrific disasters (JSF, EJB, etc).

tootie3• 7 years ago

Any organization that bought into JEE is probably willing to pay Oracle's license fees. That being said, I've literally never seen an org that preferred JEE to Spring and that includes numerous massive enterprises.

le-mark• 7 years ago

Spring is built on the good parts of JEE; servlet api, jdbc, etc.. so it's not immune to churn in this area.

sheepdestroyer• 7 years ago

Oracle never fails to show off how evil they are.

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

While there is some truth to it,they did more research for Java than Sun ever did, and no one else cared to buy Sun.

rbanffy9• 7 years ago

That's, sadly, true. At the time of acquisition, Sun was only a shadow of its former glory...

bharatm• 7 years ago

They did research not because they want to support Java community, but because they want to make gains from making it proprietary.

ThrowawayR2• 7 years ago

Oracle never fails to show off how evil they are.

Oracle actually is what techies used to think Microsoft was. Fortunately for all of us, they never managed to escape their niche.

DonHopkins9• 7 years ago

But once Eclipse products would be not vendor-neutral anymore, the EF’s tax exemption might become void, which would mean a financial fiasco, or possibly mean the end of the organization as a hole.

I think the problem is Oracle's a-hole, in this situation.

masklinn• 7 years ago

Do not anthropomorphise the lawnmower.

DonHopkins9• 7 years ago

Point taken. But also:

Do not work for, do business with, depend on, or attempt to negotiate with the lawnmower, either!

DangitBobby• 7 years ago

It's not a lawnmower. It's an organization made if people, and it's responsible for it's actions.

hajderr• 7 years ago

heads over to Python :)

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

Good luck with the performance over there.

chpmrc• 7 years ago

Before the language becomes a performance bottleneck there is so much stuff to consider that it quickly becomes clear how the choice of language doesn't really make a difference, except in special cases such as embedded systems.

rbanffy9• 7 years ago

The hot parts we can implement in C. There's not much overhead in crossing over to native code.

raquo• 7 years ago

(Not an expert on all the Java nomenclature / standards / politics)

What does Eclipse foundation have to do with Java EE? Does this news sabotage their use of OpenJ9 somehow?

aurora72• 7 years ago

After Java SE has become proprietary-like software, it was reported that Java EE division would be handed to the Eclipse Foundation. And that was good news because it meant that Java EE would be managed independently from Oracle but now we see that Oracle wants to make Java EE dependent on themselves, and that is bad news :::

mjw10072• 7 years ago

« Oracle already started a blocking politics at the Eclipse Foundation’s board, where Oracle has a seat, and where unanimous decisions are needed. Oracle now has the power, and apparently will use that power, to block the foundation’s future. It demonstrated that power already in a board meeting, where they had the sole vote against an otherwise unaimous move. »

I hope other organisations with a director from Oracle are taking note.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/board-members/

dtech10• 7 years ago

For me it's more a lesson about how unanimous votes, or unanimous - N can become problematic.

In the EU the same is happening. Poland and Hungary have found a loophole allowing them to ignore EU rules and sanctions while still profiting from subsidies and market access.

All sanctions against a member state require unanimous-1 (all states except the sanctioned member) votes and Poland is vetoing all sanctions against Hungary, and Hungary all sanctions against Poland.

mjw10072• 7 years ago

That too, but I fear there are likely to be ways a hostile director could cause serious trouble even without a unanimous vote requirement.

james_s_tayler2• 7 years ago

Yeah unanimous is ironic in that actually a single actor controls the outcome.

stereo• 7 years ago

It’s an old Polish tradition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto

ChuckNorris89• 7 years ago

Hungary and Poland aren't the first to abuse the unanimous-1 veto.

The Netherlands always vetos Romania's application to enter the Schengen zone as Romania's harbors to the Black Sea will provide cheaper alternatives for import of goods to the Dutch ones.

bluecalm• 7 years ago

Well if they believe similar things they vote accordingly. It's not a loophole, just two governments having similar views about those issues. It's for the better as well, if you allowed sanctions for refusing immigration policy you would end up with huge backlash and likely several countries exiting EU.

bitL• 7 years ago

Poland and Hungary have found a loophole allowing them to ignore EU rules and sanctions while still profiting from subsidies and market access

AFAIK this was tit-for-tat: HU & PL closed/sold-off their industry in favor of WEU in exchange for subsidies. Removing these subsidies for any reason would violate the main economic agreement between them and EU. Mind you, there is no significant locally grown industry in those countries anymore (outside of a few state-owned industries), WEU profited from this enormously, especially Germany. As economic potential of this arrangement has been exhausted after 25 years already, incorporating UA is the next move to give EU (primarily DE/FR/NL) some nice economy boost for the next 10 years. EU is essentially playing Sim City.

badpun• 7 years ago

How’s that a loophole? That’s literally how unanimous works, if EU wanted to be ruled by majority, they should have decided on that instead.

coldtea14• 7 years ago

You think e.g. Germany doesn't do the same with several satellite countries they play for with funds, trade deals, diplomatic pressure, and so on, to get a bunch of votes on EU matters based on their interests?

7812• 7 years ago

France broke the EU deficit rules for over a decade. Everybody talked about it, but nobody acted.

If a EU state refuses to do a thing, that's basically it.

https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/france...

lkrubner• 7 years ago

The irony is that Poland was once the #1 or #2 power in Europe, but they were destroyed by unanimous voting. Want to raise taxes to build an army to repel foreign invasion? Everyone agrees, except that one person too far from Russia to care, and the taxes get vetoed, so Russia wins, thus Poland was destroyed. The Poles know how dangerous unanimity is.

yumraj3• 7 years ago

UN security council is another classic example, where any permanent member can use the veto to block any resolution they want, regardless of how the other permanent or elected members vote.

hollerith2• 7 years ago

OK, but Poland and Hungary are far from the only nations ignoring EU rules (though they might be the only ones ignoring certain particular rules).

Take for example the Italian government's decision to run a deficit higher than what is allowed under EU rules (2% per year if I recall correctly). The EU tried to put a brave face on it: they held negotiations with the Italian government and announced a compromise, but it was pretty obvious to people who follow EU politics that the EU had no effective means to enforce the rule on Italy.

And this cap on deficit spending by governments of member nations is no minor rule. Many had stated over the years since the introduction of the Euro that the rule is necessary for the single currency to work.

thrower123• 7 years ago

Two countries in the EU that seem to be actually concerned with their futures and the welfare of their citizens...

nazka• 7 years ago

I don’t understand how the org let that happen... Does someone know or have articles about it? I can believe that they left the unanimous vote and then had the good idea to invite Oracle at the table without some Power play behind it.

nbevans• 7 years ago

.NET Core will welcome this round of Java orphans with open arms.

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

First it needs to sort out its history of not being compatible with all .NET Framework libraries.

scarface7442• 7 years ago

The world is moving on from .Net Framework - including Microsoft. .Net Framework is definitely the new COBOL. It’s basically in maintenance mode. Any company would be crazy to start a new greenfield project using .Net Framework and should have some type of plan to move to Core.

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2018/10/10/net-key...

The presenters said it will still be released with Windows, as it's a component of Windows itself, so it will be supported for the lifetime of Windows. Microsoft is just going to be making highly compatible targeted improvements to .NET Framework after version 4.

So you shouldn't feel pressured to move off .NET Framework, but just know that it's going to be much more highly targeted compatible fixes kind of going forward and we recommend that all new development that you start on .NET is on .NET Core if possible

nathanaldensr3• 7 years ago

This has already happened. You're simply spreading FUD. Nearly all the major libraries .NET Framework developers have had access to since 2002 are now available as .NET Standard libraries.

.NET Standard is the compatibility[1] you talk about, but seem to know nothing about.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/net-standar...

vfc1• 7 years ago

The Java ecosystem has been slowly dying for years, it's already the new Cobol at this stage.

I have the impression that a lot of the mindshare has switched to the Node and Javascript ecosystem, especially the frontend devs, via the Typescript / Angular path, which is a natural path to Java developers due to the comfort given by familiar concepts like static types, classes, etc.

When I used to do Java, I always found that Spring was a much better framework than Java EE, and have used it in most projects I've worked.

Oracle did not take a note from the Microsoft book and is really behaving that an evil corporate overlord.

It's clear at this stage that they bought Sun in order to slowly turn Java proprietary, and charge billions to the companies that are now fully Java-based for the next few decades.

I'm glad I saw the writing on the wall and switched, but the problem is that Java is still being taught a lot at schools, and school programs especially universities are hard to adapt and only change every 4-5 years or so.

_lbaq4• 7 years ago

Working in the JVM world I'm always surprised to hear that its dying, the JVM and Java moves faster forward than ever, Graal is about to go 1.0, a bunch of very interesting (very) low latency GCs are in the pipe (for example ZGC and Shenandoah) and lots of other interesting projects like Valhalla promise to keep the JVM relevant for the next 20 years. Oracle have made some moves to monetize on parts of its investment, but the situation is largely misrepresented.

Ref:

- https://openjdk.java.net/projects/valhalla/

- https://www.graalvm.org

- https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/zgc/Main

- https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/shenandoah/Main

acqq3• 7 years ago

Working in the JVM world I'm always surprised to hear that its dying

So how is this "JVM world" escaping the grip of Oracle? E.g. graalvm is directly Oracle's, or am I missing something? Specifically, what is preventing any of the Java-related things people use now (including those that you mention) to end like the OP is describing?

Asking as somebody outside of that world, but interested "how much it's worth considering" under the given circumstances (Oracle being Oracle, demanding a lot of money for everything Oracle's that some company could use, and owning a lot of that "world"). Where are the boundaries? What is safe and outside of reach of Oracle? E.g. what is safe for a small company to use?

bborud4• 7 years ago

Reality is subjective and local.

At any given time most developers will neither have much real choice when it comes to technology nor have a longer term perspective. Hence most developers will stick to what they know and what organizational inertia seems the path of least resistance.

The comparison to COBOL is good for several reasons.

dtech10• 7 years ago

Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. Remember that the original plan was to have all Valhalla features in Java 10.

Java/JVM was in the ideal position to dominate the software world for the whole 21th century 15 years ago. Instead they did an IE6 and stagnated for so long that their competitors became plain better.

I'd say Java/JVM is now where IE was in 2008. Still massive majority market share, but in decline because people are switching to competitors. LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake, and a multitude of languages like Kotlin, C#, Go, Rust and even Javascript and Python are chipping away at Java's market share.

djvu93• 7 years ago

Java the language is slightly different than JVM but nevertheless the future is not very bright IMO. So far there are a few areas Java/JVM still holds a strong position but if you take a look at GitHub trending there is little or now new blood coming in.

- Android. No serious competitor to Java yet (JVM is irrelevant). But the Google lawsuit could have some complication.

- Spring stuff. I won't be surprised if they will be replaced by golang and nodejs (along with react/angular/vue etc). Same path for RoR.

- Data processing: Spark stuff, PrestoDB, Flink, Kafka, Hive, HBase, Lucene/Elastic etc. Java/JVM is still dominant but golang could be a future contender. A few new application databases/KV stores are implemented in golang.

The problem for Java is that the last category is mostly services (instead of libraries/frameworks) so you can potentially use any language to work with them, and the industry probably won't create many jobs for building generic services especially in the cloud era. So having the dominance doesn't provide a lot of protection.

lars_francke2• 7 years ago

Please remember that such viewpoints tend to be very subjective and depend a lot on your environment.

Where I am (geographically, company wise and ecosystem) Java and the Java ecosystem are very much thriving.

tyingq• 7 years ago

I wouldn't say that for Java EE.

ivan_gammel3• 7 years ago

Java is not even close to be pronounced dead and it’s still the best ecosystem and platform on the market.

realusername8• 7 years ago

I would not go as far to say it's dying but it's heavily slowing down for sure. First because of the big move out of the "entreprise" software and secondly because of Oracle legal team. It's definitely due to the licensing that Android is switching to Kotlin for example.

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

Except that Kotlin still lags behind Java compiler speed and it is heavily dependent on Java libraries.

threeseed9• 7 years ago

a) Java/JVM hasn't moved out of the enterprise space at all. Not sure where you got that idea.

b) Android isn't switching to Kotlin because of licensing since it is a JVM language after all. It's purely because it is a much better language than Java and has great tooling courtesy of Jetbrains.

bradleyjg• 7 years ago

PagerDuty, Zoom, Slack —- seems like a great time for enterprise software.

smoyer• 7 years ago

Spring is compliant with and reliant on many of the JavaEE specifications - JDBC, Servlet, JAX-RS, etc. It provides DI that is not JavaEEs CDI.

I'd consider Spring as more of a non-JavaEE application server. Pick either Spring or Wildfly/Glassfish/Websphere/etc and you're either using part of the JavaEE specification with the former or the full specification with the latter.

Avoiding JavaEE for micro-services requires moving to something like DropWizard. Instead of a 200MB application server you end up with a 20MB application. Unfortunately, running that application in a Docker container will spin up a 180MB JVM. So the main reason we're moving away from JavaEE is actually more related to our move to container orchestration and that was originally driven by our adoption of micro-services. If you write a micro-service with a single end-point why should it use 500MB of memory?

roca• 7 years ago

Nothing wrong with being the new COBOL. We need a new COBOL is Java is pretty good for that.

At least it would be if Oracle wasn't trying to squeeze it dry.

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

I've spend quite a bit of time doing javascript and typescript lately. Typescript definitely patches up a lot of the ugliness of javascript but you still deal with the same messy ecosystem of tools, libraries, and other cruft. It's been slowly getting better over the years but it's still not that great. I see typescript more as a gateway drug for people who seem to think that Javascript is all there is and then discover that actually having a type system unlocks all these amazing new tools that the rest of our industry has been enjoying for a few decades.

Guess what, if you like typescript, you'll love Kotlin. It's a much cleaner language, just as expressive, and it has a whole range of things that typescript simply can't do or that it simply does better/more elegantly because typescript is stuck preserving compatibility with javascript and all it's weirdness. MS has done a wonderful job of shoving a lot of that under the carpet with typescript but fundamentally types are optional because all javascript has to be valid typescript and therefore it has to also allow all the silly hacks, misguided features, and other cruft that javascript people have been coming up with for the past decades.

You might also like C#, Rust, Elixir, and several other languages that each offer their own tools, libraries, and features. I'm seeing a pattern with many frontend developers in the last few years that they at some point become full stack developers and shortly after start adding more languages to their repertoire. I know former node.js developers doing Rust, Go, Elixir, Kotlin, Rust, etc. now. Most of them are not very eager to move back to doing node.js projects.

Like Kotlin all these languages are all coming to the node.js/browser ecosystem through WASM. Full stack in 2020 is going to be a very different beast than just a few years ago.

Right now WASM already allows lots of languages to be used for just about anything that people currently do with javascript and typescript in browsers or in the node.js ecosystem. As this becomes more mature, people are inevitably going to change the ecosystem. This is already happening. E.g. Rust is being used for many low level npms for a few years now. However people have also been developing frameworks and libraries in Rust that work around/replace that ecosystem entirely. For a Rust person dealing with crates is preferable to dealing with npms, webpack and all the other stuff that is used in that ecosystem. So, they are fixing that. The goal there is to run pure rust in wasm in the browser or on v8 with 0 npms pulled in or used during the build process.

Likewise, there's an ecoysystem of multi platform kotlin libraries emerging and that allows you to build wasm or native applications and libraries without needing things like webpack, npm, etc (but using gradle instead). Same with C# and blazor. Each of those ecosystems uses browsers and node.js as runtimes but try to minimize/eliminate/replace most of the rest of that ecosystem. In the same way the Kotlin ecosystem is also starting to provide alternatives to stuff from the java EE and Spring ecosystem. E.g. Ktor is a multi platform web application framework that you can use instead of spring boot and run natively or on the jvm. It's also a drop in replacement for anything you might want to do with e.g. express.js. Doing express.js applications in Kotlin is of course also possible, but why would you when you can have ktor instead? In the same way building react applications in Rust is possible, but replacing it with a rust specific framework is much less awkward.

So, I agree things are changing but I'd say the node.js/browser landsace is changing as well and will not involve a whole lot of javascript/typescript for people coming from the JVM or other ecosystems.

You might make the point that there are all these millions of npms out there that can't be replaced easily. I'd counter that with the point that an awful lot of them seem to have very short shelf lives and are in fact replaced/discarded regularly.

coldtea14• 7 years ago

The Java ecosystem has been slowly dying for years, it's already the new Cobol at this stage.

Not in any industry I know.

hodgesrm• 7 years ago

Time for another sortie by the COBOL evangelism task force.

Java has been the new COBOL since its inception in the 1990s.

I programmed quite a bit in COBOL early in my career. It's an extremely efficient language for scanning records especially in an era when a large proportion of data was stored offline on mag tape. Most common business problems of the era could be expressed and solved effectively in COBOL, which is why it became so popular.

I programmed in both C++ and Smalltalk in the early 1990s, which were innovative but also difficult to use for large systems. Java hit a happy medium with its C++-like object syntax, built-in libraries, and virtual machine operation with garbage collection. Add in the network effects from wide adoption (leading to tools and libraries) and it became a huge hit.

Oracle seems to be going out of its way to submerge the language in confusion. But nobody should mistake this as a reflection on the inherent capabilities of Java or its fitness for use.

Edit: correct typo

DaiPlusPlus4• 7 years ago

How does one secure a COBOL gig today, and is the supply:demand ratio such to guarantee excellent compensation and working conditions?

int_19h4• 7 years ago

I think you're missing the point of the COBOL comparison. It is not meant to imply that Java is similar to COBOL as languages go, or that it is as bad as COBOL, or even that COBOL is bad.

In fact, you described exactly why it is the new COBOL: because it is also an efficient and popular language for common business problems of our era, that is hugely popular, but mostly in "unexciting" places like large internal enterprise apps, out of sight for many. And just like COBOL, it will keep ticking on like that, probably forever.

tootie3• 7 years ago

JavaScript is practically stone age compared to Java. Debugging is a nightmare. Documentation is a nightmare. Scaling is a nightmare. NPM is a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters.

Java suffers from having some 20-year old codebases because it's been so popular for so long but I can open up a 2004 WebLogic project in Eclipse or InteeliJ and trace everything it's doing. And modern Java has added all the nice features we expect a modern language to have. Java's slow demise is due to terrible PR and Oracle's endless insistence on JEE when every sane developer is using Spring.

udkl• 7 years ago

This. Sure JavaScript is moving fast .... but it's moving haphazardly.

exabrial2• 7 years ago

CDI may be the golden egg though. I enjoy using it as an alternative to Spring, it's just unfortunate it comes with the deadweight of legacy ee.

iSnow3• 7 years ago

I am not very sensitive to all those issues, I find the JS/CSS/HTML web stack a bit antiquated (virtual DOM, LOL), but very usable.

But the build toolstack is a pure, unadulterated nightmare. I used to think Maven's XML orgies, archetypes and learning curve were bad, but diving into Webpack et al was a new dimension of horror. This time based on JSON, though.

pron11• 7 years ago

The Java ecosystem has been slowly dying for years, it's already the new Cobol at this stage.

This has been said for at least the last ten years. Not only is Java not dying, but companies like Apple and Facebook (not to mention Netflix, Amazon and Google, that are mostly or largely Java already) are increasing their investment in the platform. This was not the case when COBOL was 25.

The reason this is so is that Java is by far the most technologically advanced server-side platform in existence. It continuously presents technological breakthroughs in GC, compilation, and low-overhead profiling technology (just in the past few years it did so again in all three -- with ZGC, Graal and JFR). Node, Python, Go, Erlang -- none of them even come close. .NET comes closest, but even it is pretty far behind. This certainly wasn't the case when COBOL was 25.

It is true that for a short period of time, somewhere between 2002 and 2005, Java was more dominant than it is today, but that was a fluke. More "scripty" runtimes and languages were usually more successful in the "smallish software" domain. In 1995-2002 that was VB (and others); now it's Python. Also, there has been some decline in all languages due to the ubiquity of JavaScript on the browser, but Java did not suffer more than others. Maybe less so.

Oracle did not take a note from the Microsoft book and is really behaving that an evil corporate overlord.

Oracle has just open sourced the entire JDK. Sun didn't do that and even .NET isn't entirely open source. I have no knowledge or involvement with EE, but it seems Oracle simply doesn't have faith in EE, and doesn't want the Java trademark associated with it.

(I work at Oracle on the JDK -- i.e. OpenJDK -- but speak only for myself)

dijit• 7 years ago

I think you’ve drunk the kool-aid a little. Outside of complex projects headed by PhD compsci students (who used to learn java in uni but those courses are now taught in python) there isn’t a whole lot of mindshare going towards java these days. At least in regards to new FOSS projects.

I can say that my company’s use of java is diminishing rapidly over the last 5 years too.

No matter what you think of the technological advancement of the language and ecosystem- it matters not if people are not using it.

Oracle itself is a pariah, the vast majority of the tech industry avoid it.

Rattled• 7 years ago

Oracle has just open sourced the entire JDK.

Last time I had to download a JDK I got a warning about having to pay a license for commercial use. I think most enterprises care more about the licensing arrangement than access to the source.

wbl• 7 years ago

Good luck doing that when OpenJDK exists.

edwinyzh• 7 years ago

As a Delphi developer this is the first time I heard about Java is dying, and in a reply the other one said that some is saying so for over a decade :D

And I think Java is more alive then Delphi, at least no one is setting up a site like http://www.isdelphidead.com/ :D

nullwasamistake• 7 years ago

Java is much closer to C++ than COBOL. COBOL has been massively obsolete for decades. Java has a lot of historical cruft but the basic syntax is still somewhat modern, mostly based off of C++ and agruable better.

Like C++, it's modern features are being slowly added. There's a huge difference between Java 8 and 11, in performance and features. Innovation is hardly dead.

Java EE and Spring are both terrible. I recommend trying some of the newer frameworks out there to see how much nicer things have become. DropWizard is my favorite right now.

I'm no Oracle fan, but Java is more "open" in many ways than it has been since the beginning. It wasn't till a few years ago we had a feature-complete high performance OSS implementation as the standard.

Oracle will try to ruin it, but the GPL JDK and history of projects being forked away from them makes it fairly safe. It's not in the interest of any Java user to have more than one standard.

IMO Java isn't going anywhere. It's been top 3 most popular language for over a decade. JS is somewhat promising but will never match Java in performance and multi-threading support due to core design decisions. Go is too verbose to get industry buyin to replace Java in most use cases. WASM is promising in the far future but it will take years to have a full browser and server ABI. The only real contenter to replace Java is C# and so far it's not getting much traction.

If anything killed Java it would be C#. Value types, no type Erasure, unsafe code and some native vector support. But it hasn't and probably won't ever dethrone Java. Java has a combination of decent features and an insanely huge amount of library support that makes it the default language of many companies.

floriol2• 7 years ago

Why do you think Java EE is terrible?

oselhn• 7 years ago

Recently started working on Typescript project and it looks to me like java with really poor tooling, C++ like compilation times and huge mess in libraries (i.e. how to determine which version of @types package I need). I think that Typescript is really step back from java.

ksec• 7 years ago

How can a languages and its ecosystem that is being used actively in many projects within ALL Fortune Global 500 company and most Fortune Global 2000 be dying?

When people say Ruby is dying, it would be more accurate to say they are not growing or they are shrinking. But given the size of Ruby marketshare of less than say ~2%. I would not really disagree with their notion.

But Java? I mean even from a Web Development prospective, given you mention Node, JS and Spring Framework, it is Far from dead.

And this is speaking as someone who likes Ruby and dislike Java.

xorcist3• 7 years ago

On the contrary! They are likely very aware of Microsoft's strategy and probably regard it as being too soft. They intend to milk their technology to the last drop.

You and I may regard it as evil, but it's a perfectly valid strategy. Perhaps it's more common outside IT? It's the brutally honest business strategy.

I can sort of appreciate that they don't play around. Perhaps not my first choice of technology, but you certainly know where you have them.

fmakunbound• 7 years ago

Spring was a much better framework than Java EE

You can't compare these frameworks. They're in entirely different spaces, with different requirements and constraints.

josefx2• 7 years ago

the worst case possible, as it not only voids the “WORA” (Write Once Run Anywhere) principle, it simply won’t happen in reality: After 18 months virtually no application vendor really wants to spend the time and money to update all customers with recompiled versions just for the sake of a renamed platform with a dubios future.

WORA was never perfect, I would be surprised if there was even a single JRE release that didn't note a breaking change in its release notes. So vendors should have a process to update their releases just for that already in place.

The future is unclear because Oracle already started a blocking politics at the Eclipse Foundation’s board, where Oracle has a seat, and where unanimous decisions are needed.

They have no rules to out board members acting in bad faith?

djakjxnanjak• 7 years ago

If they have such rules, I wonder how many votes they require to use...

DonHopkins9• 7 years ago

Oracle would block any rules against acting in bad faith, or simply not follow them.

wangii• 7 years ago

how hard will it be to work out a script, that update the namespace automatically? it would even be possible to do that in the bytecode level I think.

I think Eclipse Foundation is f*cked, not by Oracle but its bureaucracy, and inability to reinvent itself.

cesarb2• 7 years ago

how hard will it be to work out a script, that update the namespace automatically? it would even be possible to do that in the bytecode level I think.

Java has reflection, so classes can be loaded by name at runtime (and the name might have come from a XML file somewhere, or be the result of string concatenation); also, the name of a class can be easily obtained so code can depend on that (for instance, a logging configuration XML file). That's before considering that some libraries generate classes on the fly (by dynamically generating and loading bytecode, which include class names).

k__• 7 years ago

Oracle is a disease. Everywhere it spreads things get bad :/

bborud4• 7 years ago

Oracle makes Java a risk factor in all projects. I stopped approving new Java projects in my team 2 years ago after we switched to Go. This wasn’t a decision we took lightly and it took almost a decade for me to be comfortable with leaving Java behind.

But it is the right thing to do. Oracle is not trustworthy.

threeseed9• 7 years ago

Strange attitude to take when you can just target OpenJDK and then it is completely irrelevant what Oracle does or does not do.

The fact is that every single one of the largest companies has some Java or Scala code within their core platform. And none of them have ever raised Oracle as a risk.

tatersolid2• 7 years ago

The most valuable corporation in the world as of this date uses zero Java for anything “core”.

Anecdotally, nearly every CIO/CTO I’ve encountered in the last few sees Oracle as a huge risk. Most particularly with regards to databases, which are even sticker than applications which have shorter life cycles.

cmiles743• 7 years ago

In this case we have Oracle using the JEE namespace discussion as leverage to try to force the Eclipse Foundation to distribute their VM with their products.

If Oracle had succeeded, would that mean that every developer that downloaded the Eclipse IDE would be subject to Oracle's licensing and a possible audit target? I believe that it would.

https://developer.ibm.com/javasdk/support/commercial-licensi...

Everyone should move off of Oracle's VM. I think Oracle is going to be more agressive in discuraging this or making it more difficult.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

when you can just target OpenJDK and then it is completely irrelevant what Oracle does or does not do

Yeah, Google thought the same

perlgeek• 7 years ago

What's the relationship between OpenJDK and Oracle, exactly?

As somebody who's not deep in the Java ecosystem, the precise relationship is not clear to me, but it does seem that Oracle is a major contributor to OpenJDK at least, most likely also involved with the project steering.

rtempaccount12• 7 years ago

As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Oracle employs a lot of/most of the developers who work on the OpenJDK.

So Oracle's attitude to OpenJDK and the possibility that it cuts back on development is a likely factor for people considering the platform.

bborud4• 7 years ago

No, it is not irrelevant and people thinking it is makes it more dangerous.

orangecat• 7 years ago

you can just target OpenJDK and then it is completely irrelevant what Oracle does or does not do

If Oracle's copyright argument holds up, then they can kill or cripple OpenJDK at will by denying it the ability to implement new Java APIs.

AlexCoventry• 7 years ago

It's sane to be leery about entering into any kind of contract with a counterparty as grasping and merciless as Oracle has proven to be. If they find an exploit in the GPL, Java projects are in for a bad time.

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

Oracle makes Java a risk factor in all projects.

Far as I understand having any Oracle products is a liability. They can't 'audit' you if you don't use any of their products.

arunc• 7 years ago

Just curious, what makes you think Google trustworthy (in relation to Go)? It is not surprising that corporates control and drive the languages and ecosystems in their own favor. IMO, Rust and D are truly open source, even though D lacks the corporate sponsor like any other major language.

19870213• 7 years ago

I propose to mimic the intended move of the Indonesian government to move the capitol from Java to Borneo by forking OpenJDK/Java to OpenBDK/Borneo. If Oracle wants to keep the Java(tm) trademark, they can keep it.

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

Are you going to replace the 99% OpenJDK developers that are on Oracle's paycheck as well?

sangnoir3• 7 years ago

Yes. The Java ecosystem is far larger than Oracle. Java can absolutely thrive if Oracle were to cease to exist tomorrow, or if everyone else[1] decides to move to a fork.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19827875

dtech10• 7 years ago

And the idea that corporate developers or even frankly any developers are switching to LLVM and WebAssembly en masse is pretty ridiculous.

There is only 1 popular language released since 2009 that targets JVM: Kotlin. All other target JS, their own bytecode or LLVM: Go, Rust, Dart, Elixer, Julia, Typescript, Swift.

This is a significant difference from 2003-2009 languages which all targeted JVM unless they were Microsofts: Groovy, Scala and Clojure.

pjmlp64• 7 years ago

And all of them have a lot of work to catch up with 25 years of market experience.

scarface7442• 7 years ago

Because development that happened in 1994 is really relevant today.

How will these languages ever catch up with innovations like JavaBeans, Java Server Pages, and Java Server Faces?

dtech10• 7 years ago

You could have said the same about Cobol in the '90s

macintux• 7 years ago

Elixir is built atop a VM older than the JVM.

repolfx4• 7 years ago

And who uses Dart? Elixir? Julia? Hardly anyone. Lots of attempts but also lots of failures, sometimes due to poor runtimes or libraries.

Swift is iOS/Apple specific, at least in usage. But mobile is dominated by Android, which is moving towards Kotlin. So Kotlin is already huge right there, much larger than Dart or Elixir and probably larger than Swift, soon if not already.

Meanwhile Go would probably benefit from targeting the JVM, or at least having the option. As is, it's stuck in its own isolated world with low quality tools, libraries and GCs.

At any rate number of languages is an odd metric. Kotlin by itself is a good enough language to probably kill off most attempts to compete with it over the next 5-10 years or so on the JVM, outside of research languages. Does the JVM really need dozens of languages?

dtech10• 7 years ago

A lot of new languages fail. It's still a good measure of where things will be 10-20 years later.

Look at new languages of 1990-2000: Haskell, Python, VB, Lua, R, Ruby, Java, Delphi, JS, PHP, Rebol. 4/11 are mostly irrelevant now. 4/11 are important niche languages. 3/11: Python, Java, and JS are dominant players.

1990-2000 might be special because of a massive shift toward IT systems in general, but it might not be and be an indication of languages lifecycle.

erik_seaberg5• 7 years ago

stuck in its own isolated world with low quality tools, libraries and GCs

"Go needs a native library for ___" is used as an opportunity for safely tedious résumé-driven development. On the JVM you'd have to look for an unsolved problem which is probably harder.

zmmmmm• 7 years ago

There is only 1 popular language released since 2009 that targets JVM

You are going to upset all the Clojure fans with that :-)

But what would be the point in more JVM languages? I feel like a big factor in that is just that every niche is well filled with mature languages now.

sctb• 7 years ago

(We've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825584)

based23• 7 years ago

I bet Oracle will have its MS pivot moment, sooner that we think, to face AWS, PostgreSQL, IBM/Red Hat, Pivotal Spring offers...

But it was a lot of time wasted:

Apache Harmony/Java

LibreOffice/OpenOffice

MariaDB/MySQL

Jenkins/Hudson

now Eclipse/Java

Right now, they are in sales hurry mode, calling at all occasions technical contacts each time you create a new account to download something on their web site...

...

https://netbeans.apache.org/

https://cloud.oracle.com/containers/kubernetes-engine

...

In O/WebLogic, javax.* imports are by default private.

Open9J vs Graal

https://github.com/eclipse/omr/issues/1118

based23• 7 years ago

forgot Iluminos/OpenSolaris story - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=33m0s

https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mike-milinkovich/update-jakar...

Note: Oracle ECM, WebCenter Content has no simple Virtual Document solution.

rafaelturk• 7 years ago

We all love Java, however we need to decouple the Language from the ecosystem that the new owner of Java, Oracle, wants to enforce upon customers.

Oracle made a clear business decision and will go forward squeeze every single dollar they possible can thru legal means, not from innovation or services.

repolfx4• 7 years ago

How are they squeezing dollars here? They don't seem to be demanding payment, or at least not directly.

I read the board notes. This appears to be a disagreement about trademarks and compatibility licensing. To be called "Java" you need to be compatible with the Java specs, and also have a trademark license. That's how they enforce that the platform can be reimplemented but it's seamless to users. Seems Eclipse Foundation doesn't like that.

znpy• 7 years ago

Dumb question... Wouldn't it be possible to fork the namespace to something like javax -> jawax (or java->borneo as someone suggested) and then patch the JVM to alias the javax package to the would-be jawax package (or borneox or whatever) ?

ZiiS• 7 years ago

Technically easy, but thought to expose that new JVM legally.

needusername5• 7 years ago

You would probably rather write a JVM agent that changes the class references.

Eclipse will almost surely fork the namespace to something jakarta related.

needusername5• 7 years ago

Which turns to to be quite easy:

https://twitter.com/rafaelcodes/status/1125032183167688706

fiddlerwoaroof2• 7 years ago

The other option is a maven plugin that lets you rename packages and then someone posts a list of rules on a StackOverflow question for renaming the new namespaces to the old ones: that way, no JDK distributor is distributing software that understands the old package names.

theandrewbailey2• 7 years ago

Maybe have a more sensible namespace convention. Presently, for any given API, it's a toss up of whether it's under javax.* or java.*, with no rhyme or reason.

ausjke• 7 years ago

Oracle is a cancer.

Android may get infected one day which is worrisome.

What about MySQL.

Google should have bought Sun in the first place, unfortunately all they could see is its searching with ads.

Google better buy Canonical now before Oracle or other evils do it.

theandrewbailey2• 7 years ago

If anyone buys Canonical, I'm betting on Microsoft.

sheeshkebab2• 7 years ago

If I understand correctly, OpenJDK is licensed under GPL with classpath exception - and the only thing that is preventing openjdk from being unusable in any commercial settings is a few lines of legalese, controlled by Oracle, on handful of source files in various packages. If Oracle removes that classpath exception legalese in some upcoming jdk version from these source files (which they are fully in control of), openjdk essentially becomes GPL-only.

I guess then openj9, coretto etc would be more appealing but soon enough it feels like there will not be Java left - since those distributions don’t/can’t call themselves java unless oracle allows them to... and I’m not sure why they would - as apparent by OpenJ9 not being called java.

So is it Java EE is dead, soon followed by Java?

Am I mistaken about any of this?

blattimwind• 7 years ago

Am I mistaken about any of this?

You can't revoke a GPL license unless the licensee violated the GPL. Additionally, the GPL has this nifty "Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients" clause. In other words, if you put some code out there under the GPL, there is no way for you to un-GPL that particular code. Even if you bring out a new version of it that isn't GPL any more, the old version still is. (This is quite important to make copyleft work)

amanaplanacanal• 7 years ago

It sounds like the parent's issue is the other way, that Oracle might remove the classpath exception and then GPL would infect everything, effectively killing commercial opportunities.

tzs• 7 years ago

You can't revoke a GPL license unless the licensee violated the GPL

Probably true for GPLv3, because GPLv3 actually says that it is irrevocable. OpenJDK is under GPLv2, which does not say anything about revocation. It is an open question whether or not GPLv2 can be revoked.

Additionally, the GPL has this nifty "Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients" clause. In other words, if you put some code out there under the GPL, there is no way for you to un-GPL that particular code

That clause actually makes it more likely that GPLv2 could be at least partly revoked, because the full text is:

Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor [...]

It's that "original licensor" part that makes partial revocation a possibility.

What if the original licensor simply says that they are no longer granting new licenses? Everyone who already has a license can continue to use the software, but new recipients no longer can get a license? (That's what I meant by "partly revoked" earlier--existing copies remain OK, but the spread of them, or derivative works of them, is stopped).

What happens then is a mess. Even figuring out who has standing to sue to try to make license issuing continue is a mess, getting into such questions as whether the unspecified future downstream recipients of copies are intentional beneficiaries or incidental beneficiaries of the contract. (And then there is the whole "is this a license or a contract?" issue which is very murky).

BTW, even licenses that do say they are irrevocable might suffer from this partial revocation danger if downstream recipients must get their license from the original licensor.

The fix to this is to allow sublicensing in your license. Make your license irrevocable (so that once someone gets a licensed copy it cannot be taken back), and allow sublicensing so that when someone distributes a copy the license for that copy comes from them rather than you. Then if you stop issuing new licenses there is no problem, because people get their licenses from their distributor.

If you don't want distributors to be able to give their downstream less rights than you gave them by only sublicensing a subset of those rights, you can put in the license a clause that requires distributors to sublicense all the rights.

A nice side effect of the sublicensing approach is distributors have standing to sue for license violations. Under the GPL-type approach, where all licenses are directly from the original licensor, only the original licensor can sue to enforce the license. Under the sublicensing approach, both the original licensor can sue (alleging copyright infringement) and the distributor can sue (alleging violation of the license).

jacques_chester6• 7 years ago

The JDK would promptly be forked from the last-covered commit, presumably by a coalition of Amazon, Azul, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, Google, Microsoft (amazing times we live in) and Pivotal amongst others.

What enterprise customers want is certainty. Given the choice between "Java by Oracle" and "Basically still Java by Literally Every Other Enterprise Software Vendor", they will pick the latter in a heartbeat.

It would be chaotic and disruptive, but once the dust settled Oracle would (again) be holding the fizzle instead of the bang. That's how we got Jenkins out of Hudson, which has an unrivalled penetration of enterprise.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we sponsor Spring and have a deep interest in the evolution of the OpenJDK. This is of course personal speculation.

fiddlerwoaroof2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't this run into the issues behind the Google-Oracle lawsuit around the Android runtime?

dfrage• 7 years ago

Oracle is not letting them test builds with the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit), which under Sun probably killed the Apache Harmony project. There are alternatives like Amazon's Corretto and Azul's Zulu.

exabrial2• 7 years ago

The beauty of the JVM is that I could make a class loading agent that fixes 'the problem' of the package renaming at runtime.

needusername5• 7 years ago

To me this seems like a play against OpenJ9 which is at least partially based on OpenJDK. Rumor has it that AdoptOpenJDK lost their TCK license because they also published OpenJ9 builds.

I'm a bit surprised by this given that IBM is a long time license holder and I can remember JavaOne keynotes where Oracle celebrated IBM "joining" OpenJDK.

avierax• 7 years ago

Where can I read more about AdoptOpenJDK losing its TCK license? Is there any post? Any leak from their team?

javagram2• 7 years ago

I searched for this myself. Found a tweet from last year and the current statement on their site. https://adoptopenjdk.net/quality.html

Java Compatibility Kit (JCK) / TCK Compliance
At this stage the London Jamocha Community CIC (aka LJC) has not been able to reach an agreement with Oracle to use the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) under the terms of the OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (OCTLA).
We will continue to work with Oracle on this matter.
All AdoptOpenJDK binaries are tested with our suite of functional, integration, stress, and performance tests, including real workloads from popular languages and applications. We are very confident in the quality of our builds.

needusername5• 7 years ago

https://twitter.com/volker_simonis/status/105261065466907443...

narrator• 7 years ago

Oracle fights with the open source community and loses, again. They just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. What always happens is the Open Source people say "screw Oracle" and fork the project and the community comes along with them.

The Hudson/Jenkins and OpenOffice/LibreOffice fails were two of the quickest and most obvious. Java EE seems like the same sort of thing, but much bigger and in slow motion.

doggydogs94• 7 years ago

Java would be better off if even Microsoft owned it.

sqldba2• 7 years ago

Is Java separate to Java EE? Does this news have any impact on Java in general?

jeevest• 7 years ago

Are new systems being constructed in Java .. when starting on new projects Java was at one time (about 6-8 years ago) the leading alternative for Corporate IT (if they weren't a Microsoft shop). I doubt it very much.

Oracle is playing this not-so-good role, that Microsoft used to play, under Steve Ballmer, monopolistic, and evil.

I found Java hideous, the gratuitous OOP taken to extremes put me off. Spring came in, and you had class names that were a hundred characters long - your actual line of code was shorter than the class name. The problem with Java (and every programming language has its own achilles heel) - is everything has be class oriented - however much you try to bolt on, on top of that , to make it seem not so. . Java kills creativity, and expressiveness in software by its bloated syntax and OOP. We took up Java because at the time alternatives were few, but now its on its way being the new Cobol - this will sound ridiculous if you still are fully or partially, inside its bubble

I ran from our Java shop. My software architect mocked me "you'll be back in 6 months" - instead, he quit the Java shop and stuck his head outside of the Java bubble and realized there was life outside.

sriram_malhar• 7 years ago

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers. I think they don’t stifle enough of them"

--Flannery O'Conor.

Java EE and CORBA had to go. It didn't matter who pulled the plug.

Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

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