The situation concerning the open source projects previously maintained by Sun Microsystems has been slowly degenerating since the company’s acquisition by Oracle [ORCL], and it would be nice for a better understanding about what is still “what” after this past year of consolidation… especially when it comes to the vast array of Java-related projects.

If you remember Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, you may recall his involvement with Sun and its various projects. He has a personal blog (he’s a fellow WordPresser!) and he has assembled a list of the open source projects and their current status that may be of interest to you, gentle readers.

Microsoft [MSFT] and Nokia are finalizing an agreement to augment Nokia (particularly Symbian/S60-based) phones and smart devices into becoming viable business-grade devices, or even components in functional corporate meshes.

Management Perspective

Despite the consumer penetration by Apple [AAPL] in the smart mobile device market, neither it nor Palm [PALM] with its new Pre device or even Microsoft itself, with its Windows Mobile platform, have made the significant inroads that RIM [RIMM] with its various BlackBerry platforms have made in the business community. And while adoption of Nokia/S60, iPhone/iPod touch, Windows Mobile, and Android smart mobiles in the SMB segment has been tremendous, none of them have been able to make that tremendous security investment and network ubiquity that larger corporate entities demand.

Research in Motion: Problems

Not to say that RIM has completely protected its devices from espionage or other nefarious hacking attempts. But given their early adoption into businesses, BlackBerry devices have had the benefit of early market entry and dominance to keep its competitors at bay. But for the past few years, with the encroachment of the iPhone and its powerful distribution channel known as the iTunes App Store, RIM has had an increasingly difficult time justifying its add-on costs to tech-savvy companies that have very specialized needs that should not be restricted to the RIM network services.

Even worse, the BlackBerry devices actively marketed for business use carry hefty price tags that are beyond the hardware and assembly costs and yet are not as subsidized or discounted by the wireless carriers. This has become so extreme that many long-time BlackBerry owners have eked out a living by sticking with their old models.

Palm: Problems

Despite the recent rollout of the Pre, and the expected launch of the Eos, Palm has been limited to Sprint [S] for its wireless service on the Pre, while the more ubiquitous Centro and Treo smart devices continue to appeal to both businesses and consumers because of the stable Garnet OS platform and the wide plethora of applications available. In fact, despite the development onslaught of iPod/iPhone apps being released, the total software base of Palm OS/Garnet OS applications far exceeds every other mobile phones’.

But since Palm has essentially abandoned Garnet OS in favor of its newer webOS platform, the death knell for the Treo and Centro devices– while delayed– has been pealing for quite some time.

Android Consortium: Problems

While conceptually a good idea, Google’s [GOOG] open source Android platform seems to be suffering from too much expectation and not enough implementation realization. Instead of a tremendous groundswell of product releases and massive application software offerings, the problems associated with multi-vendor “cooperation” have curtailed widespread Android OS product adoption. This may be another case of early market advantage by Apple, or it may be merely due to developer community splintering and over-division.

Windows and Symbian OS: Opportunities

Combining the technologies found in Windows (and other Microsoft technologies) and Symbian OS platforms definitely provides quite an opportunity. Focusing on Nokia devices, traditionally non-Windows Mobile based throughout its history, allows for better standardization for application development, and it brings a huge developer community from the standard Windows OS, the portable Windows Mobile and CE platforms, and even interest from the XNA-Xbox networking groups. Additionally, the Maemo and S60 communities can be brought to bear to help flesh out both the Windows Mobile Marketplace and the Ovi Store.

Even more intriguing is Sun’s [JAVA] and Oracle’s Java Store (known on the distributor side as Java Warehouse) availability, given the strong presence of Java ME on Nokia smart devices. While Java Store has not been formally launched yet, finalizing the available revenue models for software developers who want to leverage that channel would benefit all of these potential collaborators. Combining Java technology (and JavaFX Mobile, too, ‘natch) with the distributed computing opportunities by the usual Sun-Java partnerships, like with Amazon [AMZN] Web Services and Elastic Cloud, as well as plenty of other hosting services (like Joyent) would further intensify and magnify the reach and coverage for businesses and corporate users.

And, of course, there would be plenty of consumer bleed-through opportunities as a result… Could you imagine purchasing Xbox LIVE games from your smartphone and having the option of either playing them on the ‘phone or having them ready to play at home via the download queue?

Taking a page from the now-popular mobile app stores, Oracle [ORCL] and Sun [JAVA] are ramping up the launch of the Java Store, with a private beta already available, after its announcement during this year’s JavaOne.

The premise is, of course, to allow software developers and smaller indie publishers to bring their qualified software to the masses while streamlining, simplifying (hopefully!), and unifying the marketing, ordering, and online delivery processes. If done correctly, this will be a huge windfall for Java development houses everywhere, and it may also provide a new distribution avenue for applications built upon Java bytecode compatible platforms.

Yesterday, the Eclipse Consortium officially released the sixth major release of the IDE, Eclipse “Galileo”.

While Eclipse was originally developed to support Java development, it has experienced phenomenal growth and expansion to encompass a wide variety of programming languages and architectures. Since it has broad industry support from a galaxy of IT companies and groups, it has continued to gather more functionality, to such an extent that it is difficult for it to remain as the all-in-one IDE package. As a result, over the past several years, it has been released as a suite-of-sorts of different combinations of functional components: developers are obligated to pick and choose with configurations best suits their needs.

Unfortunately, the extensive componentization of Eclipse has also increased its apparent complexity (some would even argue that it is overly complicated). This is part of the lively competition between Eclipse and its arch-nemesis, NetBeans, which is also undergoing an upcoming 6.7 release. This also brings into the equation the issue of which company is supporting what… after all, given Oracle’s [ORCL] acquisition of Sun Microsystems [JAVA] and its support of the Eclipse Consortium, what will Oracle’s own tool set evolve into?

Developer’s Perspective

Exploring new dev tools is always a mixture of trepidation (“Oh, is it going to break everything I’ve been working on?”) and fun (“Oh, another new feature I’ve been buggin’ them to include… got it now!”). The new Eclipse release is no exception.

What makes Eclipse unique in considering whether the upgrade is valid is its componentized nature. Some savvy developers have, in the past, merely reached into their current configuration set, inspected the new modules, and fetched just the ones that they needed and/or grabbed the source code for the modules they were interested in, and just hacked it into their current version, disregarding the core platform upgrade altogether. This has become more and more daunting of a task, however, so during the inspection process, I would imagine that a lot of developer-hackers who have done this in the past may reconsider.

As for dev shops that have worked with both Eclipse and NetBeans: long gone are the days when you could build a hybrid Eclipse-NetBeans IDE for your developers. The codebases are too disparate, and unless you’re using one of our Mac Pro monsters, managing the code updates may not be worth it.

If you’re using a combination of Eclipse and NetBeans, or some other 2+ IDEs, the level of integration or coordination frequently converges at the VCS level. On more rare circumstances, it may be abstracted to the build/CI level; and even more rare, it may be at the issue tracking level– which would be quite dire indeed. If this manner of dev coordination is acceptable, you’re not going to want to change it any time soon. But if not, this latest release of Eclipse may be the deciding point to force the issue to a single-IDE methodology.

For the Love o’ the Mac

In case you haven’t noticed yet… The Eclipse 3.5 distributions are now shipping with Cocoa-built binaries now. This has been a long time coming for many developers who’ve used Eclipse on the Mac, and for some developers, has often made them strongly veer toward NetBeans instead.

It remains to be seen, outside of those developers who’ve been playing with the beta versions of this release, whether native Cocoa support is what brings developers back to Eclipse. I’d imagine that iPhone developers who also manage their OS X apps via Xcode will be at least curious about how Eclipse can mesh with their Xcode-provided libs; and it almost goes without saying that GNU C/C++ and Web developers who have been struggling with other tools on the Mac will want to look at Eclipse 3.5-based IDEs (even if not the official Galileo toolset).

Management Perspective

Always a sticky subject for the stricter management teams, unless they are distinctly single-IDE shops.

The reliable way of handling this issue is to assign your most experienced developer-architect to experiment with the new release to see how well it works in your existing dev environments. This becomes more crucial when you have a continuous dev cycle that blends your dev, testing, staging, and deployment targets together.

DevPal’s (and Javamancy’s) Stance

It’s all good ‘n fine to sit around and speculate on how great one dev tool is, blah blah blah. But outside of generating noise, it isn’t otherwise productive.

Since we’re running a mixed-tool studio, it’s clear that we want to put the new release through its paces before we make any significant retooling efforts. But most likely, unless there are glaring problems, we would be using a customized Eclipse 3.5 as our main IDE with several Eclipse Galileo variants for more specialized work and deployments given to clients who require special code considerations during design or coding phases.

In the meantime, good hunting, folks!

A Little Bit:

According to a CNN article, Oracle [ORCL] has announced that it is entering into an agreement to buy Sun Microsystems [JAVA], which changes the Java dynamics in the IT arena and the business world.

N.B.

• Official Oracle Press Release (4/20/2009)

We’ll be exploring this emerging news about a possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems [JAVA] by rival IBM [IBM]. And it is shocking news, to be sure, but would it be a bad thing?

Sun and its Competitors

Sun has been languishing in the stock market for a few years at this point. Its competitors, such as IBM and HP [HPQ] and Oracle [ORCL] and Microsoft [MSFT], engage its customers at all sides, and it competes against all comers across multiple segments, from hardware to software to services.

Sun’s Strong and Not-So-Strong Points

It is difficult to fault Sun for sticking to its proverbial guns as a hardware vendor, since its products are definitely quality items technically. Also, its technological innovations are certainly top-grade: UltraSPARC, Solaris, Java, ZFS, etc. And its contributions to the developer community are unquestionable as well.

But Sun has also suffered from the fading gleam of the dot-bomb era. Although it has been several years since that defining event in the Internet age, it still has that stigma for many managers. It also has the unfortunate label of being too “expensive” across its wide product portfolio. Some of this may be warranted, as directors and managers browsing its online server catalog may tell you. But, like many other companies, you have to look around for the deals… which is where Sun’s involvement in open source projects enters the picture. On the Java side, the combination of Sun’s ownership of the Java brand, its stewardship over the platform, and the multitude of software (and third party hardware!) developed on the platform make it a compelling story to be 100% Java… Even if you are not a Java developer and/or user, you may still have benefited from the cultural renaissance that it brought to the developer workflows and methodologies. Unlike Smalltalk, which had seemed to be relegated to a small niche target audience (and remember IBM’s involvement with that? ), Java was ambitiously launched (and many would say, relaunched a few times) toward a much broader audience, for both desktop and server development. It is difficult to say “Web 2.0+” without thinking about Java’s role in bringing it to fruition.

And even if you do not code in Java the language, you may be using products or languages that operate on the Java platform: Groovy, PHP, Python, Ruby, and other dynamic languages either natively operate on a JVM or have variants that do. And you may be using development tools that, while created in Java, enable you to code in several different languages– many times, all at once if you’d like. Sun’s participation in these various development projects has been strong, so it would be hard to ignore the contributions of its employees and its support for their work in these areas.

Recent acquisitions by Sun have fleshed out its product portfolio more, including its purchase of MySql. And its widening of its open source support, particularly in the OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, and LAMP/SAMP deployments, have painted a fairly comprehensive soup-to-nuts picture of how being fully Sun-ized from development to production is certainly possible.

But perhaps the lesson from IBM’s past is something which has finally caught up to Sun: while it is certainly possible to be the end-all, be-all for IT, it may not necessarily be the best thing because the accommodating customer base has dramatically shrunken since the heady days of the dot-coms. Many potential customers are dealing with heterogeneous computing platforms, and integrating heritage systems with newer ones has greater perceived value to them. And for customers who want to do everything from scratch, finding a single-source vendor for everything appears to be a scary concept to be avoided at all costs, literally. IBM’s course of action was to cut back on its hardware focus, and instead turn its attention toward service and software engagements. Perhaps this is the way of things: further commoditize the hardware concept, but differentiate using software and services.

Just don’t cut back on the innovation.

Coming Soon

This is intended to be the first in a multi-part series, where we explore a variety of aspects surrounding Sun and Java. Stay tuned!

N.B.

Other title candidates:

• Sun to be Acquired by IBM?
• The Future of Sun: Acquired by IBM?

It’s been awhile in coming, but it’s finally here: NetBeans 6.5.

Like many of you, I’ve been itching to have a plethora of development capabilities integrated into a single unified interface that does not require me to constantly scour the Internet, or several different vendors’ sites, or even just constantly ping around various different “repositories”, for the latest updates and fixes.

Not to take anything away from Eclipse (the other heavy hitter in the IDE arena), but having to manage the massive amount of Eclipse-lets or fall in line with a specific distribution has brought along its own synchronization issues. In the past, it had gotten so onerous that I had to create a team to manage our Eclipse configurations. In contrast, my NetBeans-using teams were able to just get along with their single image and a select set of add-ons, getting their work done.

Of course, there’s a lot of convergence between NetBeans and Eclipse; that will undoubtedly continue well into the future, until perhaps the two projects merge into a single product(?).

One of the big things that NetBeans 6.5 brings to the table is the long-awaited official support for more dynamic languages. This production release brings some of them to us, especially PHP (which previewed on a beta of 6.5 for awhile).

Check out the NetBeans release at the NetBeans.org site. You can also read about its features and even watch a few screencasts to familiarize yourself with the product prior to installing it.

Or you can just click on the download banner in this blog entry to start fetching your own copy.

N.B.

Yes, I advocate the use of NetBeans as part of the primary development rig at DevPal and Javamancy. Now comes the fun part: testing the IDE for its appropriate integration with the rest of the dev rig, as well as the CM and project control platforms.

A Little Bit:

As part of sweeping changes being made to try to shore up its losses, Sun Microsystems [JAVA] announced today that it will terminate somewhere between 5,000 to 6,000 jobs from its software division and then reform the business unit into three:

1. Application Platform Software
2. Cloud Computing and Developer Platforms
3. Systems Platforms

In a related note, Rich Green has decided to leave Sun.

A couple of days ago, eWeek reported that Microsoft [MSFT] is launching their new BizSpark program, intended to help startups develop their products using Microsoft products.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Gee, isn’t that just like programs from other companies, like Sun?”

Well, yes, but– no.

The Startup Essentials from Sun [JAVA] is an upfront subscription based program that provides various resources for startups, as well as discounts on various Sun products and Sun-branded services. In addition to the available services, it also opens the opportunity to discuss options with some Sun-connected VCs.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s BizSpark is a time-limited (three year duration) program that attempts to target privately-held SaaS (software as a service) development companies that just started (been in business for less than three years) that are currently generating less than $1M USD revenue annually. Easy enough, right? If your company qualifies, you get a MSDN subscription and accompanying software and RTU for SaaS dev work, as well as (potentially) access to Microsoft’s Azure computing cloud platform. In addition, your company gets listed in the BizSparkDB, a directory listing for the startup companies under the ‘umbrella.

Once the three year duration completes, you’re obligated to pay a $100 USD entry fee (although you’re exiting).

Not a bad deal, right?

More Reading

• Microsoft BizSpark (main site)
• Microsoft Startup Zone (main site)
• Microsoft Startup Zone: BizSpark — At a Glance
• Sun Startup Essentials: Application