Top 10 From Oracle – Sun Webcast

Today’s Oracle – Sun webcast covered Oracle’s plans for Java & other Sun technologies post acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. While the twitter hashtag #oraclesun is a good place to find info & opinions on Oracle + Sun, there’s also a lot of not so useful stuff there.

Justin Kestelyn at OTN did a great job of summarising the webcast in tweets. Below are excerpts from his tweets that I think are most relevant to the developer community. Stated in no particular order. Head over to oracletechnet for the entire coverage.

1. We will “keep and invigorate” the Sun, Solaris, Java brands (Charles Philips)
2. JavaOne will be co-located with Oracle Develop in SF, will run in parallel to Oracle OpenWorld (Sep 2010) (not merged)-and in BRIC
3. Oracle knows how to make money from Java. Growing the middleware business is more important than monetizing Java specifically (Ellison)
4. We will invest in JavaFX for improved RIA/REA development – and blur the lines between it and JavaScript, ADF (Kurian)
5. We will bring “focus” to NetBeans as tooling for dynamic langs, mobile development. Make JCP more participatory (Kurian)
6. MySQL will have independent sales force & dev team, and we will make it better (Screven)
7. Will continue to develop & support OpenOffice. Look for Cloud Office (Screven)
8. We have no problem supporting both Linux and Solaris; they serve different markets. (Ellison)
9. The only thing new about cloud computing is the word “cloud” (Ellison)
10. There will be cross-pollination across the GlassFish and WebLogic Server DNA (Kurian)

Oracle has also put up an FAQ for the developer community which talks of the future of java.net, OTN, JavaOne, user groups & communities.

While the webcast does provide clarity on some issues, it also seems like a lot of open & politically correct statements were made which don’t actually provide any definite direction. My single line takeaway is that Oracle is committed to Sun technologies but I still can’t say which Sun tech would get attention & which would gradually fade away. For the moment at least all the popular Sun technologies will survive.