The necessary conditions for Java success: Open source thinking to promote innovation

Conditions

The Open Source Community development tool consolidates Java's leadership in the developer marketplace.

There is no doubt that open source has made Java a huge boon. The JCP (Java Community Process) on which the Java language and platform are developed seems to be moving at a snail's pace. The review and approval of the Commission is a slow and deliberate process, and Java, after all, is the leading enterprise application platform, so it should evolve slowly, even if demand is tight. It is never a good idea to solve some problems by creating other problems.

However, its relatively open source community has been moving at a rapid pace, with significant innovations being introduced. Currently, the Enterprise Java Basic tools are all open source products: Ant (for development applications), Hibernate (for storing data on a hard disk), JUnit (for device testing), and MAVEN (for continued integration), Not to mention the highly valued Eclipse and NetBeans development environment and the PMD source code verifier.

Java developers also benefit from several open source frameworks, such as JSF (JavaServer Faces), spring, and struts. Then there are numerous containers (container): Apache Tomcat, Geronimo, Jetty, Jonas, and resin, not to mention a lot of small containers for embedded applications. Open source is a great source of imagination and productivity in the Java world.

Between the two Rivers--JCP and open source, 3 companies are standing between the Java technology providers: BEA, IBM and Sun Microsystems. They are all one foot standing in the open Source Tool River, the other foot in the non-open Source Tool River. Although many IBM tools are proprietary, it has been a major contributor to the Java and open source community. Bea has recently been very active in implementing its "hybrid" strategy, actively supporting open source products. In addition, BEA donates code and programs to multiple open source projects.

Sun is a little maverick. Enthusiastic Open-source supporters have been pushing Sun to open Java source code, hoping to accelerate innovation in the platform, but Sun has been slow to move. This makes sense: Open Java code may split Java into different versions, reducing Java's proud portability. But the open source community has been sharply attacking Sun's stance.

Given Sun's long-term contribution to open source, this puts it in a strange situation. Sun is still the only one by one companies that open their operating systems and the full productivity suite source code. In fact, it opens up a lot of Java technology's source code. As a result, Sun revealed, perhaps reluctantly, in the linuxworld of August that it intended to open both Java libraries and Java virtual machines, in addition to a community site for developers to track their progress.

In the long run, is this powerful power to open source a benefit to Java? In addition to its slow development progress, part of Java's success is due to Sun's stewardship. Depriving the sun of this role by opening Java source code can lead to a significant increase in the Java platform and may eventually hurt it.