What Sun Should Do

Tim Bray has written an insightful piece describing his perscription for a healthier Sun, at the end he suggested others might want to do the same, so here is my version.

Product Strategy

Sun’s problem is not that they don’t have good products, it is they have too many products for them to sustain.  As Tim mentioned they need to focus on their strengths and that would Glassfish and MySql.  MySql has a great reputation and community, they need to protect it.  In the last two years I have seen significant momentum in Glassfish, in particular they are staking out leadership in OSGi.  Keep it going.

Like Tim suggested, Sun needs to give up on JavaFX.  Someday it might be great technology but it doesn’t matter, Sun just doesn’t have the reputation or the reach into the graphic design houses that produce the cool web sites to feature this type of technology.  Ajax, Flash and Silverlight will battle it out for the hearts and minds of RIA style applications.

I am not going to say anything about NetBeans, since I am obviously biased but let me say there are many ways to attract developers.

Sales Strategy

Sun’s biggest problems are on the sales and marketing side.  How is it they are still so overly reliant on sales from the financial services industry.   Sun got wacked in the dot.com crash due to reliance in revenue from the banks and they are getting wacked again.   They need to diversify their sales into other industries.  This means hiring different sales people that know how to do this.

Open Source Strategy

Sun needs to re-consider its open source strategy.   Claiming that all Sun software must be open source provides no opportunity for license revenue.  They need to adopt what the Matt Aslett at the 451 Group calls an ‘open-core’ strategy.   Basically get wide spread adoption of the base platform, like MySql or Glassfish, and then sell up with specialize tools.   It seemed MySql was going down this path before the acquisition; it needs to be reconsidered.

Java & JPC Strategy

Lets hope the Sun leadership team listens to at least one of Tim’s recommendations:

As for Sun’s role as Steward of Java, and in particular the Java Community Process, let it go already.

Please just do it, the JCP is busted, Sun needs to let it go; just do it already.

So what do you think Sun should do?

Reminder: Eclipse Banking Day in NYC in 2 weeks

Just a friendly reminder that the Eclipse Banking Day in New York City starts in two weeks time on December 9.  We have a great program that features talks on Equinox, EMF, RAP, BIRT/DTP and others, plus speakers from Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, RBC Capital and UBS.   It should be a great event.

If you work in the financial services industry and use Eclipse, think about joining us on December 9.  There is no cost to attend but you must pre-register before December 5 to be added to the attendee list.

Live from ESE 2

I was able to track down 3 more Symposium leaders at ESE.  Hear what they had to say about the highlights of their symposiums.

Jeff McAffer, co-leader of Eclipse RT PMC, discusses the highlights of the RT Symposium.

Christine Mitterbauer talks about the results of the Test-Driven Development Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe.

Joern Weigle talks about the Banking Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe, with special guest appearance by Ralph Mueller.

Live from ESE

Well almost live from Eclipse Summit Europe, I am asking each Symposium leader to talk about the highlights of their Symposium.

First up is Ed Merks as he discusses the Modeling Symposium

Boris Bokowski discuss the e4 Symposium.

Doug Gaff talks about the Embedded Symposium

I will hopefully get a chance to talk to the other Symposium leaders later today and tomorrow.

First Eclipse European Members’ Meeting

On Monday at Eclipse Summit Europe we held the first Eclipse European Members’ Meeting.  I have posted some of the presentation slides on the meeting agenda.  (I will post more when I have time)

Three presentations really caught my attention:

1. Karsten Schmidt did a great job telling the SAP Eclipse story, chronicling how SAP has become involved in Eclipse.  What I found particularly interesting were the slides describing why SAP chose Equinox for their future version of their server.

2. Hans-Christian Broxman did a great job introducing the concepts and motivation for the new Eclipse SMILA project.  SMILA has the potential to be one of the Eclipse projects that can take Eclipse and in particular Equinox into a new industry.  Interesting stuff.

3. Martin Oberhuber has certainly re-energized the Eclipse Architecture Council and his AC update is a good summary of what they are doing.  It is just great to see this level of activity from the Architecture Council.

Thanks to everyone that presented and attended.  I look forward to doing this again next year.

New Java Certification from O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media has announced a new Java programming certification.  As reported on Slashdot, it appears to be competition for Sun’s Java Programmer certification.

What is very interesting is that students will use ‘a special learning version of the Eclipse open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment), where students apply new skills as they are presented by completing real-world projects.’ The new learning IDE is called Ellipse.

Seems to be a number of interesting educational projects going on in the Eclipse community.

Thank you Adobe!

As many know, Adobe is a great supporter of Eclipse by the fact that their FlexBuilder product and soon to come Thermo product are built on Eclipse.  Having them use Eclipse for these products is a great endorsement of Eclipse as a universal tool platform.

Therefore, it is great to see Adobe contributing 6 full translation packages for Eclipse 3.4, including translations for French, German, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Korean.  What a great way to inject value into the Babel project. I am sure out global Eclipse community will appreciate their contribution.

Thank you Adobe!

SAP’s vision towards Equinox

SAP has previously stated that their next generation of NetWeaver was going to be based on OSGi.  Fredrik Alstroemer from SAP Java Server developer team has written about their reasoning and in particular SAP’s choise of using Equinox as their OSGi runtime.  Some key takeaways:

- SAP Netweaver already has a modular architecture but the time is right to move to OSGi which is more or less a de facto industry standard for modularization.

- Equinox was chosen due to Eclipse’s ability to handle large number of bundles.  Equinox also appears to have a linear performance with respect to the number of bundles…

SAP is already a contributor to the Eclipse community, via their participation in WTP and the Memory Analyzer project. According to Frank, it seems they want to participate even more, especially with respect to Equinox…

“..be an intricate part on the road towards making Equinox an even bigger player on the Java server market, by investing into areas such as even higher bundle counts, and scoping.”

and

“One not so obvious area though, is the investigation into provisioning solutions, where we’re excited to look closer into the OSGi Bundle Repository and joining forces with Equinox p2.”

I also really appreciates Fredrik’s very practical outlook on Equinox and their usage:

Does all this mean Equinox is ‘enterprise ready’? Well, no, and it shouldn’t, really. But will we, with Equinox, be able to build an enterprise ready solution with all the benefits a truly modularized environment can offer? I think so.

I agree, Equinox is one part of the solution, depending on the application other services are required to complete the solution.  The nice thing though is that Equinox’s modular architecture makes it possible for SAP to create a solution for their customers; reminds me of Redmonk’s Stackless Stack.

Defining an Industry Standard for Mobile Application Development Platform

Over the last 12 months, Eclipse has gained a lot of traction in the mobile industry but a lot of the activity is based on technology slices of mobile development.  That is why it is great to see Motorola and Nokia proposing a solution to define a common Mobile Application Development Platform.  The idea is to define a single mobile application development kit (MADK) that provides the ability to do native code development, Java ME and Web development; then be able to extend the MADK for the profiles of the different device manufacturers.

To define the MADK, Motorola and Nokia have proposed to create an Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group.  An Industry Working Group is a new concept that the Foundation has created to allow for industry collaborations that might include more than just developing code, ex defining common specifications or technology roadmaps.  The Industry Working Groups will allow Eclipse members to collaborate under the same Eclipse IP policies but not require an open source project.  The Mobile Industry Working Group is the first but we hope to see more created over the next months.

Motorola and Nokia are holding a kick-off meeting next Tuesday, November 18 to discuss their initiative.  The actual proposal is here and a presentation here.  If you are interested, I would suggest you subscribe to the mailing list and attend the meeting.  I hope we will officially create this group in early December.

Glassfish + OSGi + Equinox + Eclipse = Good Job Sun

Glassfish v3 Prelude was launched today.  Check out the Aquarium site for all the links and details.

Three things that I think are great to see:

1. The Glassfish team seems to be very committed to OSGi.  The key new feature in v3 seems to be the fact they support OSGi.  Besides SpringSource, it seems Glassfish is another application server that is treating the OSGi component architecture as an important future feature for their users.
2. Glassfish  comes bundled with Felix.  Sure it would have been nice if they chose Equinox, but they do seem to be committed to supporting other OSGi runtimes, including Equinox.
3. Obviously Sun is pushing NetBeans as the IDE for building Glassfish apps.  However they are also documenting and supporting Eclipse as an IDE for Glassfish.

It is great to see Sun reaching out into the Eclipse community.  Good job Sun!