Talking to the Owl

Tim Burns' Personal Weblog Flavored with Math, Java, and Oracle

Thursday, July 15, 2004

I just starting reading Better, Faster, Lighter Java and if the book is anywhere near as insightful and entertaining as the introduction, I'm sure I'll love it. This quote on the dangerous directions being taken by Oracle et al really caught my eye.

Java is in a dangerous place right now, because the real drivers, big vendors like Sun, BEA, Oracle, and IBM, are all motivated to build layer upon layer of sophisticated abstractions, to keep raising the bar and stay one step ahead of the competition. It's not enough to sell a plain servlet container anymore. Tomcat is already filling that niche. Many fear that JBoss will fill a similar role as a J2EE application server killer. So, the big boys innovate and build more complex, feature-rich servers. That's good—if the servers also deliver value that we, the customers, can leverage.

I've seen evidence of too much big architecture with my experiences with Oracle Portal and also with the BI Beans. It seems telling that the two OAS products that I find most useful are Orion and Apache - both of which are individual or open-source products.

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