Ellison Praises Sun's Open Source Language At JavaOneEllison Praises Sun's Open Source Language At JavaOne

JavaOne, Sun's annual Java language user conference, opened with a glaring uncertainty this year. From the event's program, it was unclear who the current leadership of Sun was, since it's in the process of being acquired by Oracle. Its summary of the opening keynote said only that it would feature "Java luminaries."

That might have meant CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who typically keynotes the opening of the San Francisco show. On the other hand, he had advocated a merger for Sun with archcompetitor IBM, a move opposed by chairman Scott McNealy. So maybe McNealy was going to be the lead speaker? The conference organizers clearly didn't know the correct answer, so they referred to unnamed "luminaries."

In fact, both appeared on stage in turn, praising each other in a show of unity. Then McNealy acknowledged that "there's kind of a big pink elephant in the room" in the form of the Sun's acquisition by Oracle. He then called Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to the stage so that Ellison could outline the future of the Java language and its surrounding environment, including the new scripting language JavaFX, under the new regime.

"I don't think you're going to see a lot of change in Java coming from Oracle," Ellison told several thousand attendees in the Moscone Center hall. Ellison said he had heard people asking whether this, the 14th JavaOne conference, would be the last one. "James Gosling and Sun have done a fantastic job of inventing, developing, opening, and giving Java to the world," he said, and he doesn't want to see Java's future growth hindered.

"Oracle's middleware is based 100% on Java," Ellison noted. "Our next-generation Fusion applications will be the first ERP suite ever built on an open standard [also Java]," he added. He cited JavaFX as a strong user interface component in front of Java applications and said developers will thank Sun for JavaFX "because they no longer have to suffer with Ajax."

He said he anticipated that Google's Android operating system, suitable for telephones and netbooks, would be running Java and JavaFX applications "not only from Google but also from Sun." He suggested that Sun, as a hardware supplier, would retain the capability to produce such devices when it becomes a part of Oracle.

McNealy and Ellison shared the stage, as they have done in many previous Silicon Valley events, with McNealy clearly at ease and bantering with his company's new owner. At one point he directed him to help display a line of boat signal pennants that spelled out Java and flashed a racing yacht on the screen with "Java" on the sail instead of "Oracle." The competitive Ellison wishes to bring home an America's Cup and, every four years, invests in a boat named Oracle for the race. It would be hard to see the same scene taking place between McNealy and top executives of IBM, who helped establish Java in the business world but competed effectively with Sun for the Unix market and encouraged the rapid adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Some of that adoption took place at the expense of Sun's Solaris. Tensions ran high between the two companies through the 1990s as IBM sought to play a role in Java's future, while Sun dragged its feet on establishing an international Java standard.

A combined Sun and Oracle will command one of the largest R&D budgets in the world, in the range of $5 billion to $6 billion, McNealy noted.

Despite the camaraderie, however, Sun's future as part of Oracle is laced with uncertainty. Oracle is heavily committed to software objectives based on a new proprietary line of applications and supporting middleware. Sun's business still contains a large hardware component of UltraSparc servers and storage, plus a long list of open source code products for which it sells support. Oracle has offered open source code such as BerkeleyDB and InnoDB as alternatives to fill in holes that aren't covered by its commercial product lines.

Oracle is in a contest for market share with SAP and looking to use its application's Java underpinnings for competitive advantage. Its commitment to Sun's open source code products, such as the MySQL database and GlassFish Application Server, isn't clear at this point. Neither company can comment on product plans until the acquisition is complete, company officials said.

Schwartz announced that Sun will soon open an online store for consumers offering Java applications for telephones, netbooks, and PCs. The consumer store is in private beta and is scheduled to have a public beta this summer. The store is being built with Java business logic and a JavaFX user interface. It will have advanced, user-friendly features; for example, a visitor needs only to roll his mouse over an icon and a pop-up will appear explaining its function or simulation of how to drag the icon to the desktop space to activate it.

A second online store has been established for Java developers at java.sun.com/warehouse.

Gosling, in a programmer's uniform of T-shirt and blue jeans, came on stage, stared out at the full auditorium, and acknowledged, "We were nervous about how many people would show up," after Sun's acquisition was announced April 20. As a reward for coming, he used a giant slingshot to shoot half a dozen T-shirts into the audience, something he's expected to do at each JavaOne.

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