The future of Oracle/Sun

Three days ago, the news came out that Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems. The Oracle-Sun deal came little more than two weeks after I.B.M. had ended its talks with Sun. This deal shocked many developer and bring a lot of questions and concerns. What is next? What will happen in the future? In this post, in my opinion, I will answer several controversial questions.

The future of Glassfish

To start with, many java developers believe that Glassfish AS is one of the products which is going to be killed by Oracle. However, Let thing about this again, I believe Oracle will use Glassfish to provide new level of products for small & medium-size companies. This new level will consist of MySQL, Glassfish, OpenESB… etc .They will definitely try to attack new level of customers, because current Oracle web stack solution is heavy, expensive and not affordable for mid-scale companies. Therefore, oracle will provide support and easy migration between the solutions.

Another thing I want to mention it, Glassfish is one the most well engineered, fast, and up to date application server available, So Oracle will certainly uses glassfish's code to improve Oracle AS' code.

Finally, Oracle will keep this path open for as long as it wants to attract paid customers and avoid customers making a switch in favor of the JBoss stack.

What about Netbeans IDE?

Will, NetBeans is not only an IDE but it is an RCP, I am sure that NetBeans will have a massive impact on the other oracle products, including JDeveloper. I believe NetBeans is going to provide support for ADF framework and JDeveloper will be killded in the future, just like Oracle forum and Oracle report, because NetBeans IDE has a huge and vibrant community which can not simply be ignored by Oracle.

On the other hand, NetBeans IDE is the core for all of Sun's products. It has connection will OpenSolaris, DTrace and ends with JavaFX development. Oracle can not simply ignores these connections and kill the IDE.

And finally, NetBeans used to be the first IDE which supported the latest specifications, Oracle will keep this opportunity and continue providing bleeding edge functionality both in the deployment and server-side front by pushing GlassFish development forward and also in continuing to support the development of the NetBeans IDE and platform.
 
What about Star/Openoffice?

As the second largest software company in the world, there is at least one thing that Oracle has NOT had yet that their primary competitor has and that is an office automation suite used by students, grandmas, and enterprises worldwide. The ability to have your name in front of millions of users is a powerful tool particularly when they can download it for free and run it on Windows, MacOS, Linux distros and Solaris. I think we know that Larry is not a great friend of Microsoft and this will give him one more thing to poke in their eye.

Finally, what is going to happen to JavaFX?

The upcoming land grab for rich internet applications (RIAs) will be a fierce competition between Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle with Sun's JavaFX. JavaFX provides an advanced tool with proven security and programming model to deploy RIAs on billions of devices over the network. Its open source status will ensure a broad developer acceptance and diverse contributions from industry, academia and government. In the fight for "eyeballs" JavaFX will provide Oracle with a significant competitive advantage in function as well as wide device support.