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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

June - 2011 - issue > Technology

JAVA is Back!

Vimali Swamy
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Vimali Swamy
In 2009, when software giant Oracle announced its plans of acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the biggest question in everyone’s mind especially the developer community was “Will Oracle kill Java?” Oracle has forever been the quintessential software company while Sun with its huge portfolio of hardware solutions and Java has supported open source. Definitely this acquisition raised eyebrows about the clash in interests.

The last few years several questions have haunted the Java developer community — Will Oracle let Java be open? Will it use its control over Java to favor its own products? And, finally, which Java technologies will be killed off after the merger?

But let’s face the truth. In the last five years, Java did suffer under Sun’s hold. The company has long struggled to keep its diverse community of developers happy, creating a burdensome bureaucracy to manage the development of Java standards and gradually releasing key components of the platform under an open-source license. While Sun has made some money from Java licenses, it has missed out on big opportunities to sell lucrative Java development tools and middleware servers. More upsetting is the fact that the last major update for Java was released in 2006.

Sun remains, at its heart, a hardware company; Oracle, an enterprise software giant!

But eighteen months after it took control of Sun, Oracle has come forth and spilled the beans over Java’s fate! At the Oracle Develop and Java One conference held in Hyderabad between 11 and 12 May, 2011, the enterprise giant put the various rumors to rest and assured the developer community that Java is out there for the long haul and that it has a well etched role in the company’s roadmap. The company’s first ever JavaOne conference in India saw a participation of more than 2000 developers. The fact that the event was held along with OracleDevelop reinstated the developer community’s faith in the new management and future of Java.


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