Google technologist derides Oracle's lack of developer focus

When it bowed out of the JavaOne conference this year, Google cited Oracle's lawsuit over Java use in Google Android. But one Google technologist suggests a second possible reason for Google's reticence: Oracle's lack of focus on developers.

In a blog entry posted Monday, Tim Bray, a Google developer advocate widely known as being one of the inventors of XML, recounted a conversation he had with someone "familiar" with how Oracle runs its OpenWorld conference, alongside which JavaOne will be held this year. Bray asked why the company didn't focus more on developers at this event. The individual responded that, for Oracle, building rapport with developers was not its chief priority.

"The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship, between an Oracle business expert and a customer business leader ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation; in fact, they're apt to be dangerous distractions," Bray quoted the unnamed individual.

Although a short post, it does provide a glimpse into how priorities differedbetween Oracle and Sun Microsystems, which Oracle purchased in January.

Oracle executives have expressed enthusiasm for supporting the development communities around some widely used Sun technologiessuch as MySQL and Java. But other less successful or harder-to-commercialize projects -- such as OpenSolaris,

OpenOffice, and OpenSSO -- have seemingly been neglected or even abandoned by the company.

A number of reader-contributed comments on the post noted that Oracle's focus on the business side of technology may not necessarily be counted as a negative for the company, especially when compared to the developer-focused ways of the less successful Sun.

"How is this a bad thing? It's all about building the best applications for your customers," one poster noted. "Imagine if airlines treated their relationship with the flier as the most important. Imagine if politicians treated their relationship with constituents as most important."

Bray was a Sun Microsystems chief technologist who resigned from Oracle shortly after its purchase of Sun. Bray posted the comment on his personal blog site, where he stresses the opinions he expresses are not Google's.

Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Oracle silent on Java independence initiative

While Java founder James Gosling has campaigned for Oracle to place Java under the jurisdiction of an independent foundation, Oracle is declining to comment at all on the notion.

Asked about Gosling's efforts during a press question-and-answer session at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Tuesday in San Francisco, Oracle's Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development, simply declined to comment.

[ Kurian and Oracle detailed Java ambitions on Monday evening. | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blogand Developer World newsletter. ]

"I will not talk about that," Kurian said.

Gosling has sought to hold Oracle's feet to the fire on an effort the company supported in 2007 to have the Java Community Process become an independent, vendor-neutral standards organization. That was before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which had jurisdiction over Java at the time.  Oracle completed its Sun acquisition in January.

Kurian did, however, clarify Oracle's position on the fate of JavaFX Mobile, the mobile device variant of the JavaFX rich Internet application platform founded by Sun. An Oracle official described JavaFX Mobile as being on hold Monday, but Kurian said JavaFX Mobile will not run on the CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) lightweight Java Virtual Machine, but will run on other virtual machines.

Kurian touted Java capabilities and ambitions for mobile devices, stressing there are 31 times more Java-enabled mobile phones shipping every year than Apple iPhone and Google Android combined.

"I would not underestimate our capability [of] delivering a new Java platform" in this space, Kurian said.

Kurian also pledged continued support of the NetBeans open source IDE Oracle inherited from Sun.

Also, John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, said the final version of the Solaris 11 Unix OS is due next year. Oracle's Cloud Office collaborative application suite, meanwhile, is nearing a milestone. The suite is for the Web and mobile devices.

"We're  right on the edge of having a preview for it," said Edward Screven, Oracle chief corporate architect.

This article, "Oracle silent on Java independence initiative," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in theInfoWorld Daily newsletter.

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Hibernate 3.6.0.Beta4 release

Hibernate 3.6.0.Beta4 has been released incorporating mostly minor bugfixes and improvements. Most of the work this cycle went into the improved documentation. For those not aware we are planning on splitting the documentation into 2 books:

1. a Getting Started Guide, see HHH-5441 : this is a collection of tutorials and information on the Hibernate community, etc.
2. a Developer Guide, see HHH-5466 : this is essentially the information from the existing manual, but presented in a more topical fashion.

The Getting Started Guide is mostly done. There is a single subtask outstanding to incorporate a tutorial on basic Envers usage, but it already contains tutorials on basic Hibernate using (both with hbm.xml and annotation usage) as well as a basic JPA usage tutorial. They all build on the same schema and domain classes, in hopes it will be useful illustrating how to move from one paradigm to another. In fact they all perform the exact same steps for illustration (except for the Envers tutorial when it gets done, since it need to present a very different use case to usefully show Envers usage).

We also are trying out actually bundling up the tutorials in a working project this time (a maven mutli-module project) to make it even easier to get up and running with the tutorials. We are still working through the details of hosting that in terms of referencing the zip from the tutorials (thats the problem with modularizing stuff). Anyway, in the interm I thought this one was close enough that I went ahead and made it available from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/index.html. Some notes:

• This url is only made available temporarily
• The documentation references a link to obtain the code. That link is not accurate. We are still deciding where these will live and how they will be referenced. In the meantime I have zipped up the code and made it available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/tutorials.tar.gz (again temporarily).

See http://hibernate.org/downloads.html for details on obtaining the release. Or try http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/index.html#hibernate-gsg-obtain ;)

Please report any issues to JIRA. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have usage questions.

source: hibernate.org