The likelihood that we will be blessed with a JavaOne conference in 2010 just got a whole lot better.
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The following image is available on the Oracle website currently (original URL):

For me personally the 2 biggest questions about the whole deal have always been What happens to MySQL? and What happens to Java?

MySQL has always been open source and Java has been creeping slowly towards open source over the last few years.

Can Oracle really kill either of these technologies if they chose too? Probably not outright, but they could certainly damage their reputation and community support. People can fork code bases and start again, but it would take time (many years) to build back up to the flagships they are today.

The above image from Oracle is interesting in that it does call out MySQL but does not mention Java at all.

Perhaps Oracle sees more value in MySQL than Java and is attempting to protect it better. Or perhaps Oracle believes Java needs less protection than MySQL, after all, much of the debate over the Oracle/Sun deal has surrounded MySQL and not Java.

Wednesday is the day when some of these questions will hopefully begin to answered.

Why do you think Oracle called out MySQL and not Java?

Well, it seems almost official now, Oracle will get it hands on Sun and the Java and MySQL communities (among others) will need to hold their breath and wait to see what kind of chaos this might cause for our industries.

James Gosling (the father of Java) has long been publishing Java related images on his internal Sun blog. He has now posted his very last one.

The best comment I saw so far was “So long and thanks for all the Glassfish”.

You can read the original post here.

It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.

Robin Wauters @ TechCrunch
EU Approves $7.4 Billion Deal Between Oracle And Sun

Just received this email from the Zembly team at Sun. They don’t specifically point the finger at Oracle, but it doesn’t take a genius to join these dots.

We regret to inform you that on November 30th, 2009 we will be suspending the zembly service.

More than three years ago, we started this project with the goal of making it easy to create next-generation Web apps. Our original tagline was “Build the web, using the web,” and the ideas we were incubating around platform-mediated Web applications, Web API mashups, and social programming were brand new.

We learned a lot along the way. Your confidence and enthusiasm helped us improve the project and do amazing things that we never imagined when we began this journey.

Thank you to everyone who’s been with us through the ups and downs. It’s heartening to see that many of the best ideas pioneered in zembly have started to appear elsewhere. With your support, we’re proud to have contributed to the DNA of the Web.

For more information about the zembly suspension, please refer to the FAQ section at http://zembly.com

Finally, if you have questions, please contact us at zembly-support@sun.com

All the best,

– The zembly team

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4150 Network Circle
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Click here to unsubscribe

• wwdc keynote is underway. #
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In the opening keynote at SpringOne Europe 2009, Rod Johnson wondered if Java innovation is going to be stifled by latest Oracle acquisition and expressed his belief that Java will continue to evolve outside of Sun as it has done for the last few years. As proof he mentioned: Grails, Roo, a tool for improved developer productivity, a free STS, tc Server and dm Server.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/SpringOne-Keynote-Rod-Johnson

A few days before JavaOne I posted some questions that I was looking forward to finding out the answers too. Here is what I found out.

Has Hudson Killed CruiseControl?
I saw a couple of presentations on Hudson. I also saw Kohsuke Kawaguchi at the Thirsty Bear and he was drinking the good beer, so clearly Hudson is verging on world domination under his guidance.

I never saw Cruisecontrol mentioned anywhere. Not in the conference catalog and not in the pavilion.

I am now even more convinced that Hudson is the way forward for open source Java Continuous Integration.

What Will Be The Volume Of The Twitter Noise Coming From Inside The Conference?
There was definitely a strong stream of Tweets around the #javaone keyword all week. I was able to get a different perspective during the General Sessions by watching the Twitter stream go by as people Tweeted about what was being said on stage.

But what I will say is that I was able to keep up with the volume of Tweets. I mention this because I started to try and follow the #wwdc keyword this week as the Apple conference was going on and I simply could not keep up, not even close. Every time my TweetDeck was refreshing, I was getting more than 100 Tweets during the opening keynote. I gave up in the end and turned the live search off.

Also, while I saw some people Tweet about “is there a Tweetup?“, I never actually saw anyone take the bold step to be the organizer of one.

So definitely more Twittering going on, but nothing earth shattering. I was also hoping to see a vendor try and use Twitter as a medium for some kind of viral promotion during the conference, but I didn’t see anything that creative unfortunately.

Will AJAX Presentations Be THE Place To Be Seen For A 3rd Year Running?
So there were definitely a lot of AJAX based presentations. There were also a lot of REST presentations, which (at least in my experience) seem to always stray over into the AJAX world.

But there were also probably an equal number of JavaFX presentations. Although I would take the amount of JavaFX presentations and other buzz with a grain of salt as it is Sun’s pet project and it was their conference.

There was even an AJAX vs JavaFX presentation to round things out on that front.

But I do think my prediction of all topics related to the cloud as being the hot topics of the conference was probably correct – probably only outnumbered by speculation related to the whole Sun/Oracle situation. There was a track on the Monday morning related to the cloud, there was an unconference on the Monday afternoon called “Cloud Camp”, Sun showed off cloud related provisioning in the Tuesday morning keynote and there were a whole pile of regular sessions either related to new cloud topics, or just repositioning old topics to add the buzzword cloud to their repertoire.

What Will The Oracle Presence Be?
So a bit of a mixed bag on this front.

As most people who care already know, Larry Ellison made an appearance at the keynote on Tuesday morning. I was actually rooting for him to not show up at all – I think that would have been the best play for Oracle. I think McNealy played it well, but it was obvious that both men were a little uncomfortable and they stumbled on some awkward topics during the time they shared the stage. I don’t actually think Larry really cleared any of the FUD related to the situation even though he tried to reassure people that Oracle “likes” Java.

Beyond Larry’s appearance though, Oracle’s presence was actually less than previous years. Most notably, Oracle had absolutely zero presence in the pavilion this year. You can speculate to heart’s content as to why that was. I believe there was at least one session from Oracle personnel, but I did not make it to that one.

I didn’t see any Oracle signage around the conference, it pretty much was business as usual from that standpoint.

What Will The Reaction To The Microsoft Keynote Be?
This turned out to be a dud when compared to the chatter leading up to it.

There was little reaction from the crowd, although from my quick eyeballing of the room, it seemed to be the smallest attendance for keynote during the week.

Basically Microsoft told us that integration is import – wow, thanks for that, welcome to the party. The rest of it was a thinly veiled marketing pitch, which never goes over well at a technical conference.

Will Jonathon Schwartz Look As Uncomfortable And Awkward As Usual?
Believe it or not, I actually think Schwartz did a reasonable job on the Tuesday morning. It didn’t feel quite as stiff as usual. His interaction with partners etc. was still a little cumbersome but nothing worse than I have seen elsewhere.

I was super happy to see Scott McNealy make an appearance – it was clearly the highlight of the keynote. I also think Sun made the right call to have McNealy be the one to address the elephant in the room. The standing ovation he received when he left the stage I think was evidence of that and was also the highpoint of the whole keynote.

Will James Gosling’s Toy Show Seem Overly Long And Desperate Again?
The toy show was the same old story as expected. I sat through it and there are some interesting niche type Java things going on, but I still left the session with overwhelming sense of “meh”.

I think the most interesting part of the Friday morning keynote was the fact that there was absolutely no acknowledgment of the Oracle/Sun situation at all, nor was there any acknowledgment that this was probably the end of JavaOne, at least as we know it today. I had predicted the Friday morning keynote to be somewhat emotional with a bunch of farewells and look-backs, but as it turns out, the Tuesday morning keynote was the one that had the emotion in it.

Will The Lunch Lines Be Under Control?
Nope, lunch lines were ridiculous as usual.

I am always impressed at how megalomaniacal the event staff get at Moscone during these big conferences.

Will It Be Crazy Cold in Yerba Buena Gardens on Thursday Night Again?
I was way off on this one.

The weather was forecast to be horrible on Thursday and so the event staff moved the party to the ballroom at the Marriott on 4th street. As it turns out it was perfectly dry on Thursday and it could have easily been held outside, but it was certainly cold.

The party was actually pretty good and the band was excellent for the setting IMHO and the food was significantly better than last year’s corn dogs and popcorn.

Will The Bookstore Be Given More Space?
Nope, exactly the same space, exactly the same pushy-shovey experience trying to browse the books.

Will Enough People Use me As A Reference So I Can Get The Better Swag?
Unfortunately no.

Why are the A’s and Giants both playing away all week?
The MLB has declined to comment on this obvious conspiracy.

JavaOne 2009 starts in 5 days. Here is a list of questions I am looking forward to finding out the answers too.

Has Hudson Killed CruiseControl?
Seems like it has based on the number of mentions of Hudson vs CruiseControl in relation to the content at JavaOne. I lost my interest in CruiseControl when ThoughtWorks spun a for-profit version out of it. The only company I have seen be successful at this strategy is JBoss/RedHat where they develop the open-source version first and then roll the for-profit version out of that. The other times I have seen this attempted, all of the effort goes into the for-profit version and the open-source version ceases to progress. There is something fundamental about that 2nd pattern that just smells bad and doesn’t really seem to be in the spirit of open-source.

What Will Be The Volume Of The Twitter Noise Coming From Inside The Conference?
I have been tracking the hashed keywords related to the conference for a couple of weeks now. The volume has been slowly increasing and took a big jump on Tuesday morning when everyone got back from the long weekend in the US. I expect it to keep building up until Tuesday morning, but then what? Does it slow down because everyone is busy, or does it kick into a whole new gear and my trusty Twitterberry will just meltdown in the middle of the opening keynote?

Also curious to see what ad-hoc social activities get incubated in the Twitterverse during the conference?

Will AJAX Presentations Be THE Place To Be Seen For A 3rd Year Running?
The last 2 years have seen crazy interest in anything AJAX related. With Ben Galbraith and Dion Almer (spelling from memory there) being the focal point in their always entertaining presentations. But it feels a little like AJAX is getting to be slightly old news, at least in this forum.

My guess is that anything cloud related is going to be the hip place to be seen this year.

What Will The Oracle Presence Be?
AFAIK, the Oracle/Sun deal has not gone through yet, so technically Sun is still an independent entity. But of course I am also not naive enough to think Oracle won’t be pushing to start getting their hands on the “goods” at this conference. Will there be an Oracle presence in the keynotes that are traditionally Sun’s (the 2 on Tuesday and the 1 Friday morning)? What about signage around the conference? Oracle always has a booth in the pavilion, but will it be bigger, better positioned etc. this year?

What Will The Reaction To The Microsoft Keynote Be?
So the Twittervese exploded earlier this week when it was announced Microsoft will be presenting the Thursday morning keynote. Anyone who has been playing with Java long enough knows that Microsoft has not really been Java’s best friend. So, will the Java community accept Microsoft on the main stage? It would be nice to think that there will be some passionate reaction, either outrageous clapping or hateful booing, whatever, as long as there is some definitive reaction I will be happy. I fear the Java faithful might not be the kind to wear their hearts on their sleeves quite that much though.

Does the Oracle deal have something to do with Microsoft’s presence? Why does Oracle not have a keynote instead? Curious indeed.

Will Jonathon Schwartz Look As Uncomfortable And Awkward As Usual?
I will admit upfront that I am a Scott McNealy fan. He was passionate, and engaging to listen to on a stage. I was not happy when he was ousted from the top of Sun.

But even if I temper my anger over that situation, can anyone really be interested in listening to Schwartz talk? His stage presence is awful and he is robotic in his delivery of obviously scripted lines when guests are on stage. And don’t get me started on the pony tail, sport coat and jeans look! Bring back McNealy for the last one please!!!!

Will James Gosling’s Toy Show Seem Overly Long And Desperate Again?
I have a lot to thank James Gosling for. Most of my career is based on the technology he invented. I would like to have a beer with him at some point no doubt. But man, he is only marginally better than Schwartz on stage.

And I do not really understand the point of the Toy Show in the Friday morning keynote. You are at THE Java conference, and so the audience has self selected itself as resoundingly pro-Java. So why do we need a 3 hour carnival of Java applications trying to prove to us that Java is cool. We already think it is cool, that is why we are there. A lot of it just feels like they are pleading with us to please, please keep thinking Java is cool for another year until the next conference.

Will The Lunch Lines Be Under Control?
Getting your “free” lunch at JavaOne is an exercise in forgoing your basic right to not be hearded like livestock and yelled at by over zealous minimum wage event staff. It is like they are surprised by the number of people that show up for lunch each day, like there was no way they could possibly have guesstimated how many people might want to eat that day. Seriously, it is your last chance to get it right, please make an effort.

Will It Be Crazy Cold in Yerba Buena Gardens on Thursday Night Again?
Why is the Thursday night party outside now? I can’t possibly imagine it is much cheaper is it? It is San Francisco, it is cold on the hottest day of the year. I froze my ass off last year. The long range weather forecast looks like we are in for the same again.

Will The Bookstore Be Given More Space?
Doubt it. There is a whole convention center, and the bookstore gets jammed in a 10 by 30 square. Why? Why do you hate people who like to read?

Will Enough People Use me As A Reference So I Can Get The Better Swag?
I know 3 people who did, I think I need 2 more. I will even buy you a beer. My number is W1302019. Go ahead and earn yourself some karma points.

Why are the A’s and Giants both playing away all week?
A big boo to the MLB for having both teams out of town this week. It has become somewhat of a tradition for me to take my team to the baseball during JavaOne and you have destroyed that cherished pastime. Shame on you Bud Selig.

See you in San Francisco!

• Family Blog Update: Subscribe! http://bit.ly/2M6nX #
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• @jazzlifejunkie What % of the latest Jonas Bros tour are you getting in exchange for Kalia? Just curious. in reply to jazzlifejunkie #