JavaOne Day 2: Oracle Keynote: Imitation and Flattery

It's Day Two of JavaOne and I am covering the Oracle Keynote to see how they spin their Fusion vision today. Preparations for our Keynote are going well and we're getting good visibility . The keynote started out with an obilgatory corporate video, with the tag line "Start in the Middle". John Gage came up and did his usual MC routine, pointing out that there are 56 hours left, and his usual poll of the audience. He expressed fascination with an afternoon session with concurrency and double-ended queues. Gage then exhorted folks to go see the the slot-care racing demo, which is an example of real-time Java, i.e. deterministic Java.

Gage then digressed to talk about energy usage, and suggested that real-time java could help to rationalize power usage, and how Sun will support San Francisco Bike to Work day. Thomas Kurian them came up and talked about 3 trends:

1. JEE 5
2. Web 2.0
3. Service Oriented Architecture 2.0

In a half-full hall, his opening monologue was a stream of Java themes, including EJB3, AJAX, and he had the stock slides with words like "Rich Internet Applications". He then showed a slide entitled "Next Application Platform", and I was struck by one thing. This slide was topologically equivalent to the slide we showed on Jun 9th, 2005 when we announced AquaLogic. I am flattered that Oracle would mimic us to such a great degree.

Oracle also called out something called "Service Fabric", which sounds suspiciously like what we have been calling "Service Infrastructure".

SOA 2.0 showed up in their slides. It is interesting to me that they would use the 2.0 version, when its not clear to me that is appropriate, as if it were a pile of software.

He mentioned that they had been working with the Interface21 guys on integrating JPA to their EJB implmentation, though it is not clear how. This also raises the question of how Sun could allow one single vendor(with whom they have tight ties) to control an important part of the Java spec. They also mentioned that their "Service Fabric" is written on Spring. Again, not sure what the extent they are doing it and what it really means.

They also announced that they had contributed the reference implementation for EJB3 to Glassfish as well as the declarative design plugins to project Dali at Eclipse, as well as a deployment profile for the WTP project at Eclipse. Dali itself is realtively young, so it will be 12-18 months before this is enterprise quality.

He then emitted a stream of acronyms from the JEE and security world, as well as BPEL. One of his developers came up and then talked about ESBs and demo, and presented a fairly baroque scenario, which I found hard to follow. They then showed they the tooling to support their demo, which was interestingly all in a web browser. This part of the demo was misplaced IMHO. This was ostensibly a "designer" demo to developers, and seemed to me giving information to the wrong people. They then showed the BPEL designed in Oracle JDeveloper.

Kurian then moved to the Web 2.0 section of his presentation. Oracle's approach to AJAX, has been to take JavaServerFaces compoments and augment them with AJAX. He then talked about how they have added mobile capabilities to their platform, something we have had with our partnership with MobileAware. He also talked about how they have SIP on their platform as well, but this sounded like a driveby comment in order to check off a box. Then someone else came up and they did a demo to build an AJAX application.

Kurian mentioned that they are attempting to give their AJAX work to the open source community, though not clear which or when this would happen.

He closed by exhorting the crowd to join their community and listen to his developers webcast.