Oracle hails Java but kills Sun Cloud

Oracle's plans for Java and the proposed Sun Cloud public computing platform became clearer Wednesday, with Oracle executives giving another big thumbs-up to Java but a thumbs-down to Sun Cloud.

Under Oracle's new stewardship, Java will be expanded to more application types while the public process for amending Java will be made more participatory, an Oracle official said Wednesday at a company briefing on Oracle's Sun integration plans. The company previously has stressed its commitment to Java while waiting for the merger to close.

[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill outlines Oracle's strategy for integrating Sun's technology. | Relive the rise and fall of Sun Microsystems in InfoWorld's slideshow. ]

No interest in cloud utilitiesThe prognosis was not so positive for Sun Cloud, the public computing platform announced by Sun in March 2009 that was due to be deployed last summer. "We're not going to be offering the Sun Cloud service," said Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has questioned just how new or important the cloud computing concept actually is. But, even though Oracle will not sell compute cycles through the Sun Cloud similar to what Amazon.com does, the company will offer products to serve as building blocks for public and private clouds, company officials said.

Meanwhile, Oracle offered details on the standard, enterprise, mobile, and rich media versions of Java, as well as its plans on other software technologies such as the Sun-driven NetBeans IDE and GlassFish application server.

Oracle's plans for the various Java versionsCalling Java one of the crown jewels coming over to Oracle, Thomas Kurian, executive vice president for product development, expressed ambitions "to enhance and extend the reach of the Java programming model to support emerging application development paradigms."

"Java is the world's most popular programming language," particularly in enterprises, with close to 10 million developers, Kurian said. The company will invest in and revitalize the Java developer community and make the Java Community Process, the public process for amending Java, more participatory, he said. Sun in the past had been criticized for having too much control over the process.

Specific ambitions were aired for each version of Java.

Java Standard Edition (SE), particularly the Java Virtual Machine, will be fitted with the ability to support multiple languages. This continues with Sun had already been doing, enabling the JVM to support dynamic languages like Ruby.

Also as part of its SE roadmap, Oracle will integrate the Sun HotSpot and Oracle JRockit JVMs. Oracle intends to boost performance for Hotspot, particularly for multi-core processors. Oracle also will focus on real-time monitoring for the JVM.

Garbage collection, involving discarding of no longer used programming objects, will be optimized. Local thread garbage collection will offered for better efficiency on multicore and NUMMA architectures.

For Java Enterprise Edition, the goal is evolve the Java EE 6 reference implementation to address modularity. Java EE would be run in a variety of different profiles. This, too, has been a Sun goal.