This has been an eventful week in the tech world. Two events stood out: one is an upbeat look into the future—of PC-less computing/entertaining with Apple's new iPad; one is a painful look back at some once also world-alteringly-new technologies from Sun—having found a new home at Oracle.
The Sun/Oracle news hits closer to home.
If you haven't been paying attention to all the accounts in the press and in blogs, all you have to do is to visit http://www.sun.com/ to realize that the world has changed.
I'm grateful to Oracle for its announced strategies for Java, JavaFX, OpenOffice, etc.
For Java, it would seem that it will be business as usual. In answering a question at the event, Larry Ellison essentially said that "Oracle is making money with Java" with it's middleware products and applications, so the pressure to make money off of Sun's Java products is an non-issue.
Oracle will also invest heavily in JavaFX. Jim Weaver has a more detailed account on that front:
Jim Weaver: In the live Oracle/Sun Strategy webcast, I heard encouraging statements like:
We will invest heavily in JavaFX
Significant investment will be made in JavaFX; focus on designers; fusion of DHTML, JavaScript, Java, JavaFX
The JavaPosse spells out the JavaScript link to JavaFX more succinctly in Episode #295:
Tor (17:07): JavaFX appears to have a rosy future. They said they would invest in it aggressively. It's going to be developed across all platforms, including embedded. And they also announced that there are plans to make SceneGraph access available from JavaScript. Carl: Very cool. Tor: That's been one of the criticisms for people who haven't learned JavaFX the language. You don't want to learn the new language. You don't see the point, right. So the idea here is that you can still take advantage of the APIs in the SceneGraph, even from JavaScript. Carl: That's wild. That really gives it an advantage over all of the competition.
If you come here for the Friday quiz instead of all of the above, here's one:
Q: In which language is the following program written? Who invented the language? Will it compile? Run without errors? What does it print?
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}
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