There are some clouds on the horizon, as could be expected for a language and architecture that has been atop the heap of enterprise middleware for so many years. Writes Hilwa: “Java is under pressure from competing developer ecosystems, including the aggressively managed Microsoft platform and ecosystem and the broader Web ecosystem with its diverse technologies and lightweight scripting languages and frameworks.”

While looming lightweight languages, frameworks and runtimes do portend a new state of Java , Java’s ability to evolve to absorb new technologies has indeed proved remarkable to date. There is reason to believe there is still more to come.

Almost two years ago, Oracle launched its patent and copyright suit against Google, claiming the search giant illegally grabbed Java intellectual property when it created its Android mobile device software around Java. The case now faces a 12-member jury that will decide if Google violated Java programming copyrights that have been brought up by Oracle.  The first week of testimony showed that APIs specifically, like software techniques generally, are complicated – and contentious.

Forgoing a Java license saved vendors of Android Smartphones millions of dollars, but that could change if Oracle prevails in court. Oracle became steward of the Java standard when it purchased Java-originator Sun Microsystems in 2009.

Both Oracle and Google have been in front of a judge since Monday and will continue to do so for a projected 10 weeks. Negotiations preceded the trial, but ended with the two companies indicating that they were not close to any agreement. Google was willing to pay up to a few million dollars while Oracle demanded hundreds of millions. Early estimates put Oracle’s claims at over $6 billion, but, as parts of Oracle’s case were pared down running up to trial, estimates of Oracle’s potential takes have slid down under $1 billion.

Prior to the trial, Oracle’s contentions seemed to focus on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that hosts the Java language at run time. In the first week, the trial has focused on Java APIs. While there is some consensus that a computer language such as Java cannot be patented, Oracle contends that specific APIs using a language can be copyrighted.

Tech’s biggest “Larries” – Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page – testified in the first week of the trial, along with Mark Reinhold, Oracle Java Platform Group chief architect, and Timothy Lindholm, Google engineer, and others. Both Reinhold and Lindolm were formerly with Sun.

According to Oracle-Google trial documents, Google is asserting that “computer programming languages are not copyrightable, and neither are Oracle’s APIs.” Google says that “the Court should hold that the structure, selection and organization of the APIs are un-copyrightable.”

In its own filing, Oracle maintains that the Java APIs in question required effort and time to build, and that they do come under copyright protection. The company’s latest statement states, “Copyright protection of a computer language is also consistent with the Copyright Act’s statutory purpose to ‘promote the creation and publication of free expression’ by rewarding authors.”

Java’s creation came somewhat before the advent of a popular open-source software movement. In its last days, Sun Microsystems tinkered with open source strategies for Java. An OpenJDK was embraced as part of that effort. In turn, Google used OpenJDK as part of its effort to create the Android platform for mobile applications.

The nature of APIs proved to be difficult to describe as the first week of the trial unfolded, as Oracle’s Reinhold sought to explain what has become a lynchpin of modern application integration. In an earlier computer era, APIs were usually proprietary, shared in the form of voluminous documentation, and shared often only as part of big, expensive corporate licensing deals. This has changed somewhat of late as Web giants like Twitter and Facebook have created “public APIs” that require no license.

Reached for comment via e-mail, software patent critic and software industry veteran Lou Mazzucchelli said, “Software patents should be abolished. Others are starting to wake up to this.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “if there is a clear copyright violation, that is a slightly different story.”

It is early in the trial and the outcome is uncertain, Mazzucchelli concludes. “Not much in this case seems to be clear, so far,” he says. – Ryan Punzalan and Jack Vaughan

What do you think? Are the people who pay for Java licenses being foolish?

Well, if the OracleWorld people read the tea leaves right when Oracle rolled out the ExaData data warehouse in a box a couple of years ago, then they weren’t surprised by the heavy dose of hardware at the first day of this year’s OracleWorld. But if they didn’t read those tea leaves, they wandered into a big bundle of surprise at this year’s event. Oracle’s purchase of Sun is shaping up as a sea change for the company led by yachtsman Larry Ellison.

Center stage at Oracle World was the ExaLogic cloud in a box. It puts together Oracle VMs on Solaris or Linux, clustered WebLogic servers, the Coherence data cache, as well as Oracle JRockit and HotSpot Java Virtual Machines (destined to be combined, oh Java faithful), all optimized and running in a 386-architeced box with racks connected by InfiniBand , and employing a clustering scheme that works nicely with ExaData.  Oracle spokepeople repeatedly called it a “Middleware Machine.” Their middleware story is suddenly a hardware story, which may take a while for some to digest. What ExaData did to data, ExaLogic is intended to do to logic. “We are making Java sing on hardware,” said one Oracle technologist, citing recent benchmarks.

While it is an extraordinary box – a blinking edition was standing next to several replicas of IronMan in the Moscone lobby – claims that this is the first middleware machine are slightly inflated. Solace and Tibco have put messaging middleware on specialized hardware chips. Earlier this year IBM added data caching to its DataPower appliance. Oracle’s machine is truly an impressive piece of hardware, however, looking a bit like…well… a mainframe.

While the JavaOne crew across Market might be wondering what parts of the JRockit VM would stay and which parts of the HotSpot VM would go, and what Oracle would eventually do with Java, the Java developer ranks had yet another question to ponder: What would things be like if it had ever occurred to Sun Microsystems to ‘make Java sing on hardware?’

Keep an eye out for more OracleWorld and JavaOne coverage at TechTarget sites such as SearchOracle.com, TheServerSide.com and, of course, SearchSOA.com.

But the OpenJDK found its adherents, not the least of which was Google, which was able to take the OpenJDK and create the Android platform for mobile applications. The Google approach to Android has proved easy to learn, and the platform is quickly rocketing past the more formal Java ME platform, which has been laboring for years to gain better position in mobile applications.

Last week, Java’s new owner Oracle sued Google for its use of Java in Android, thus placing both Android and Java in a bit of limbo. There have been in recent years more and more innovative uses of various languages and frameworks running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) — some might call these hybrids. Some of these will be in a bit of limbo until Oracle’s intentions versus Google become clearer.

At issue immediately is the way people have called Android “Java-based,” and how Google fashioned a Dalvik VM to ”play nice on the small device.” This VM is described as a ‘clean room’ implementation of a JVM, similar in theme to the reverse engineered versions of the Intel 80386 processor that became widespread. For Google, part of the good news of Dalvik was that, unlike your usual JVM, it came without a license fee. In the days ahead a judge may be required to decide ‘how clean was the clean room’ that developed the Dalvik.

What seems clear for now is that Oracle will be much more aggressive in protecting its Java rights than was Sun. What is unclear is how this will affect Java generally. What do you think?

Tell us what this means for Java.

“I am not terribly happy with it,” said Reza Rahman, Independent Consultant and EJB specialist. “I would rather have seen a Sun-HP merger.”

“Sun merging with Oracle really cuts down the competitiveness in the application server market specifically and the software development market generally,” he said.

Some of Rahman’s concerns revolve around Glassfish, a Java server implementation that Sun appeared finally ready to run with.

“This basically takes Glassfish off the table. I expect it will basically be assimilated into the Oracle portfolio,” Rahman told me.

Still, Rahman concedes, Sun was in trouble, and, in turn, Java was in trouble.

He said: “This is preferable to the present situation where we have a weak Sun. It is just not a good situation as far as competiveness and innovation in the Java space goes.” It was not good to rely on a company with weak resources to lead the efforts for Java-based standards.

The suites are made up of Oracle’s existing product line and the technologies from its acquisition of BEA earlier this year, according to a brief report on the state of the current Oracle middleware offering, Oracle OpenWorld’s Middleware Message Is ‘Watch This Space,’ published earlier this month.

The Gartner analysts note that little was said about middleware in the announcements at Oracle Open World last month other than the announced plan to put Fusion in the Amazon cloud. The roadmap announced this past July for the full integration of the BEA products into Oracle’s middleware will not come until sometime in 2009, Gartner predicts.

Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g, due in the next six to 12 months.

That release ”will begin to implement the announced road map, and platform modernizations, such as support of OSGi Alliance technology and Service Component Architecture, expanded hot-pluggability, and the extensive use of Oracle Coherence XTP-distributed cache,” the report states.

Oracle has improved its competitive position in recent years with purchases of large competitors. While SearchSOA.com’s attention has rightly focused on the bold move to buy middleware specialist BEA, it was the purchase of PeopleSoft (along with J.D. Edwards) and Siebel that boosted Oracle from the big time to the really big time. The vast numbers of users of those packaged applications need service-oriented integration just as much as BEA customers working in less of a packaged purview.

As part of our Oracle Open World coverage, Rich Seeley spoke with a noted system integrator about the state-of-the-art of Oracle application integration. What we find is a tale of two cities, as Oracle touts the out-of-the-box nature of its integration, while the integration specialist points out that there is an art to this, and a bit of value-add custom integration may have its place. Perhaps the claim of ‘out-of-the-box’ integration will adhere one day. So far – whether it is a firewall, a data warehouse, or an integration hub – out-of-the-box is seldom as simple as it is said to be. Read “Oracle Application Integration Architecture targets telcos.”

A lot of SOA activity of late seems to revolve around business processes. We like to think of these business processes as the real work of SOA. At Oracle Open World, we uncovered a dandy example of business processes in action, in the form of a BPEL engine utilized by Verizon Wireless to streamline fraud detection. The BPEL engine looks at streams of data to find patterns of fraud. People still need to work with the engine to assure no one is being defrauded – but this implementation proves to be more automated than a previous more-Java-centric system. For more, read “Verizon uses BPEL app to cut down on code, check for fraud, and go green.” Learn what a top CTO is doing to streamline key business processes.

Oracle kept pushing Grid computing long after others toned it down. But the company looks to be prominent in Cloud computing which seems to be Grid’s younger – but bigger – brother. Reporting on Oracle Open World, SearchSOA’s Seeley says the company plans to make its Fusion middleware available via the Amazon Cloud. There were added details as well on Oracle’s BEA roadmap. Read “Oracle to put Fusion middleware in Amazon Compute Cloud”. 

The limits are in its applicability in applications, which may benefit from grid technology, but may not require extreme processing, says Mike Piech, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Speaking to SOATalk about Oracle’s new Application Grid product initiative integrating the Tuxedo transaction monitor (acquired along with BEA) with other in-memory data grid offerings, Piech said he isn’t pushing the XTP message because it might turn-off potential customers.

“In hanging too much on XTP there’s a potential for it [Application Grid] to be perceived as too narrow,” he explained. “There’s a potential for a customer to say: ‘My application isn’t necessarily extreme or it’s not transaction processing per se.’ The danger we felt was that driving too much from just XTP emphasizes the wrong things and sends the wrong message.”

This doesn’t mean that Oracle, one of the pioneers in XTP, is turning away from the technology.

“You’ll still hear us talking XTP where it makes sense and in context where customers see themselves as doing XTP and are looking for technologies that address XTP specific needs, Piech said. “But I would characterize the Application Grid story as more general than that.”

He noted that organization can benefit from the Application Grid technology even if they are not operating at levels that people might consider extreme.

IBM is taking a different approach to this issue having coined the term Business Event Processing (BEP) as explained this week in IBM WebSphere grows to include better Business Event Processing by Jack Vaughan.

“We’ve implemented Oracle Coherence for the shopping basket in our online site,” said Leith Painter, manager of development at AbeBooks.com. “We wanted to persist key information in memory for our buyers in purchasing books without having to read/write from the database.”

XTP is highly touted for the financial services industry where it can, for example, help prevent cyber theft by sorting through massive transaction data streams and flagging exceptions that may indicate crimes such as credit card fraud, said David Chappell, Oracle’s chief technologist for SOA, in a Q&A interview.

XTP, and complex event processing (CEP) are potentially killer apps for SOA.

John Bates, whose research at Cambridge University in the U.K. helped pioneer the event-driven technology, predicted in a SearchSOA interview that CEP could create “a new physics of computing” Where older approaches to business intelligence applications focused on hourly, daily or even weekly reports and analysis, CEP has the power to show business managers what is happening now. That’s the “new physics” Bates envisions.

Among the big vendors, IBM WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo sees CEP becoming the next big thing SOA. In an interview with SearchSOA, Cuomo envisions applications beyond transaction processing including shipping companies using CEP to monitor RFID and GPS data to track individual packages traveling on a truck.

From the analyst perspective the emphasis on events is a natural progression for SOA.

SOA is all about events, as Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, has been telling us for some time. “Our perspective is that SOA should fundamentally be event-driven,” he said when interviewed for an article on event-processing.

Bloomberg went on to say: “In SOA, services communicate by sending and/or receiving messages, and messages are essentially software events. That is how the system reflects a business event. So in a fully realized SOA implementation, the traffic you’d expect to see on the network will consist of services and service consumers madly exchanging messages — or in other words, large numbers of events in what you might call an event cloud.”

Former BEA customers, who may be unhappy with Oracle Corp.’s plans for WebLogic as its main service-oriented architecture (SOA) server, are targeted by Sun Microsystems Inc., which today announced a migration program for its JavaCAPS SOA platform. Sun is touting the lower price and open source status of JavaCAPS for former BEA customers looking for an alternative to the Oracle version of WebLogic, said Ashesh Badani, SOA director at Sun.

The special offer announced on a new Sun Web page is aimed at BEA customers who are less than thrilled with becoming part of Oracle. It includes free adapters for integrating JavaCAPS into existing WebLogic SOA environments, guaranteed 12-month pricing, and a special five-day workshop with Sun’s SOA architects for the first 20 former BEA customers that sign up for the program, he said.

The open source status of JavaCAPS is touted by Badani as an advantage over WebLogic. Customers can avoid vendor lock-in by migrating to JavaCAPS, he argued. He stressed that JavaCAPS customers are not locked in with Sun if they become dissatisfied.

“If you’re not satisfied with us, we don’t want to make it difficult for you to leave us,” Badani told SearchSOA, adding that the onus is on Sun to keep JavaCAPS customers satisfied. “So it is up to us to really focus on customer satisfaction to be sure your deployment is going the way it should. If you think we’re failing you, you have the ability [to migrate away from Sun] – nothing’s easy – but it’s easier if your working with an open source code base rather than a proprietary product.”

The Sun’s offer is most likely to attract mid-market WebLogic customers seeking an alternative to Oracle, said Bradley F. Shimmin, principal analyst, application infrastructure, Current Analysis LLC.

“What Sun is going to do is find some new customers that have existing BEA investments and are looking to roll out a new deployment in a different department,” Shimmin predicted. “Sun will also be able to further capitalize on their existing customer base that already have Sun for operating system, storage, security, etc.”

Bringing JavaCAPS into an SOA environment based on WebLogic should not be a problem for former BEA customers wanting to give Sun a try, the analyst said.

“All these platforms are interoperable so there is no problem with a heterogeneous environment with different servers,” Shimmin explained.

Shimmin said this deal is unlikely to cut into Oracle’s overall market share with its newly acquired WebLogic product, but does allow Sun to introduce JavaCAPS, which has traditionally been a lower cost alternative, to some customers.