Bye, Bye Borland

After the sale of its development tools division to Embarcadero in 2008, Borland kept only the tools dealing with requirements management and software testing. This didn’t improve its financial situation and finally Borland sold itself to MicroFocus. This was a sad end for a brand that accompanied software developer for more than 25 years. Software requirements have always been a secondary topic in the software development tools world and the trend towards agility hasn’t improved this. Now you can manage user stories with paper cards and a board. Approaches like UML are declining and you will find few items dealing with them in today’s programmers waterhole like dzone.com or stackoverflow.com, The end of Borland is just the symptom that this world is difficult for requirements tools vendors.

Oracle Buys Sun, WMware Buys Spring and You Buy Software

With a little bit of irony, just one year after having bought MySQL, Sun was acquired by Oracle. It is difficult to judge a deal that is not completed yet as the European Commission is still examining the merger. I am however afraid that the business and financial objectives of Oracle will largely lead to the reduction or the end of most of the Sun open source efforts and a serious slowdown in MySQL evolution.

Just after the future of Java becomes a topic of discussion after the deal between Oracle and Sun, WMware decided to acquire SpringSource and to give to this entity a stronger platform to promote the Java language. Since then, SpringSource has launched its Tomcat server version, Enterprise Java Cloud and Spring Roo. Previously it had acquired G2One at the end of 2008 and thus the control of the Groovy and Grails products. It is now surely the most important active player for Java software development tools.

Google is (also) a Software Development Tools Company

Google domination in the search engine world is well known, but as far as developers are concerned, it is amazing how Google is quietly occupying more and more space. Here are some of the software development initiatives of Google:
* Google App Engine
* Google Web Toolkit GWT
* Go Language
* Google open source projects forge
* Google I/O Conference

Google seems to have understood that besides the content, it should also be active in the plumbing that runs the Web. This is why software developers should be interested in what Google does in this area. You could do this following some blogs like the Google Code Blog and the Google Testing Blog. You will see that besides the well-known projects, Google releases a lot of interesting open source tools created by its development team.

This is an expensive acquisition for VMware… even if the company is rich. Its GAAP net income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $290 million for revenues of $1.9 billion. You can compare this to the estimates of SpringSource revenues that are between $10 and $40 million. Basically, WMware is spending more than its full 2008 income to acquire a company at more than ten times its current revenues. The rational behind this is to create the ultimate “Java in the Cloud” infrastructure. In the SpringSource blog , the CEO of SpringSource Rod Johnson wrote “Combined with VMware’s vSphere and other cloud-enabling technologies, we can innovate in frameworks and infrastructure to deliver a joined up experience. SpringSource application frameworks, servers and management software can give the VMware platform eyes and ears throughout the stack, allowing it to apply its uniquely advanced ability to migrate workloads and manage VMs for maximum efficiency and minimal hardware resource cost. SpringSource rapid development frameworks and tooling can provide developers with the ability to move from code to cloud in minutes. All of this with the quality you can expect from both companies, and the ease of use you can depend on from Spring technologies.”

I view this acquisition as a risky bet on the future. The market of applications as services on the net is still in its infancy and it is difficult to have a good estimation of its potential…. except if you are an industry analyst wanting to sell an expensive report on how to profit from it ;o) This area is already crowded with a lot of competitions and some of the players (Amazon, Google or Microsoft) have also deep pockets and technology competencies. It could be also a problem for VMware as its software works on operating systems of other companies that could now see it more than a competitor.

In those that will benefit from the deal, I see primarily the SpringSource customers that should see their solution backed by a more financially strong company…. if the major brain resources will stay in the company (see how the core JBoss team exited the company after its acquisition by Red Hat) and keep some focus on existing products rather that being engaged only in creating the new cloud solutions. I think also that the Java community could be happy to have another major player that has interest in the evolution of the technology after Oracle acquired Sun. Finally, there are some happy venture capitalists like Benchmark Capital which invested $10 million in 2007 and participated to a $15 million financing in 2008.

In the camp of the losers, we can put competitors like Red Hat. Its JBoss division is now going to find a more important competitor if the SpringSource servers are backed by a larger competitor based on the same open source model.

After James Gosling the previous day, the Wednesday keynote was given by Danny Coward, Chief Architect of Sun’s Client Software, which means Java SE, Java ME and JavaFX. The topic of his talk was the top five points of both JDK 7 and JavaFX 1.2.  For the upcoming JDK 7, the main improvement will be on modularity; multiple languages (Groovy, JRuby) performance support on the virtual machine; some language addition like multiple exception handling; more I/O API; a new garbage collector. For the new version 1.2 of JavaFX released in June, the top five points are: release on new platforms like Linux and some mobile phones; more UI components; layouts; improvement of performance; better ways to use data with RSS/atom feed support and a simple asynchronous framework. He announced that another release of JavaFX is scheduled for the end of the year. The keynote was completed with some nice demonstrations of the JavaFX capabilities.

Refactoring of Large Software Systems

My first choice in the technical session was ” Refactoring of Large Software Systems” by Sibylle Peter and Sven Ehrke of Canoo Engineering . The talk presented the refactoring of the architecture for an investment banking system. After four years, the system architecture had become decayed, the original developers were no longer around and there were only few automated functional tests available. Important evolutions were postponed, as modifications often created bad side effects. However the application was very important for the bank and they wanted to keep using it for some more years. The first activity was to analyze the 1800 Java classes and their dependencies. The strategy was then to restructure the class content to separate clearly the services and the presentation functions using a service oriented architecture. The project, that has already consumed 10 men/years and is still on going, is run on an agile mode. Pair programming was an essential tool to ensure that refactoring practices where consistent across the team. The main customer engineer served as a “product owner”. This was fundamental for the Canoo team, as they needed somebody able to take decisions and knowing also the impact of the existing application on other systems. Another important success factor was doing the refactoring without modifying the functionalities. This allowed running tests comparing the results of the refactored application with the original system. Trust is an essential component of the project, as the users have to let an external team restructure their critical system… without breaking it. However as refactoring progressed, a team of the bank was also able to start evolving the system again. When release dates were different between the two team, a “branch and merge” configuration management solution was adopted. Some other lessons learned during the first phase were to have a large investment in automated testing and continuous integration, have an increased communication between the external refactoring team and the bank developers to synchronize architecture vision and transfer knowledge. It is also important not to underestimate the time needed to learn the system functionalities (where do you functionally test your technical refactoring) and test the final results. After the presentation, I talked with Sibylle and Sven to transform their presentation in an article for Methods & Tools. They agree on the principle, so stay tuned to get a comprehensive written presentation of their experience.

The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects

The next presentation was ” The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects” by Dan Bergh Johnsson of Omegapoint. Although I was initially a little bit afraid that this presentation contains too much code, Dan truly achieved its goal: showing how to refactor code to make it more understandable, even for domain experts without programming knowledge…. and doing it in a lively and funny way, which is important when you get up early to assist to a conference and the caffeine effect starts to diminish. His definition of a value object is “an object with data and behavior that has conceptual value”. His conclusions are that value objects help to decrease complexity (and compound value objects are even better), that entities relieved complexity and value objects add extensibility, testability and evolution. In the second part of the talk, he took the example of a part of code dedicated to charging a credit card and completely refactored it according the principles presented previously.

JavaServer Faces

The last presentation I saw was ” A complete Tour of JSF 2.0″ by Ed Burns of Sun and Martin Marinschek of IRIAN Solutions. They presented of the new release of JavaServer Faces that had its specifications approved at the end of May. Ed Burns recognized the criticism of the first version of JSF and announced that they have adopted a lot of innovations created in the community to integrate them in version 2.0. The new release is not a revolution, but a strong evolution. Among the improvement, he cited composite components; AJAX support, either declarative or programmatic; partial state saving that will improve performance; more system events; better resources management: full “library” concept, support for versioning and internationalization; the replacement of JSP by Facelets; the possibility to have bookmarkable pages. For the presenters, JSF is a real open source project (that is not a “just Sun” project) with a lot of different contributors. The new version is more much easier to use and well worth a second look. To complete this presentation, I talked with Micha Kiener of mimmacom which distributes IceFaces in Europe. Micha is also a committer to JavaServer Faces and his point of view is interesting, even if he suggested that it could be biased due to his position ;o) He also thinks that the community around JSF is strong and that the technology would continue to evolve even in the case where Oracle, that just bought Sun, decided to withdraw its financial support. He doesn’t see JavaFX as a direct competitor to JSF. His view on the market is that some products (JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight) target more the mashup, media, gaming or mobile market. On the other hand, JSF, GWT and their Ajax frameworks competitors are more used to develop applications with a “traditional” user interface, like on-line banking for instance. That is how JSF is used by some major Swiss corporations. He made also interesting remarks on the open source market and the commercial companies that try to monetize these technologies. He sees some products, like user interface or programming frameworks, more as “contributors” to the software development infrastructure. You can make some money in training and support as companies adopt them, but this stops when the company has its own competencies. Other technologies, like databases or web servers, are applications that run the everyday software infrastructure. In this case it is easier to sign long term support contracts.

I also had the chance met some of the Jazoon organizers, Christian Frei and Andreas Knobel, of Keynode. They were very kind with me and happy with the fact that the conference audience was higher than last year. There registered this year 1000 participants, around 50% of them coming from outside Switzerland. Videos of some of the conference talks should be available in July on Parleys the excellent conferences video web site. You can also stay tuned on our Java videos and tutorial directory where the will be listed.

Sun Press release said “There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris.” I think that this last sentence will reflect the main point of this purchase, as far as software developers are concerned. In his quest for getting a more important share of the software infrastructure of companies, Oracle acquires mainly a programming expertise and operating system that should complement its application and databases solutions. The hardware part should also allow Oracle to offer a complete optimized hardware and software solution to its customers, even if, due to Sun smaller market share, Oracle has to be friendly with its other hardware partners like HP or Dell. Acquiring Sun, Oracle also increase its expertise in the Java middleware area, after the acquisition last year of BEA Systems.

The other fact which is contained in Sun press release sentence, or I should say which is omitted, is MySQL. Sun acquired MySQL in January 2008, as a way to boost its software offer. MySQL has been for a long time an important issue for Oracle, as it was a big competitor in the lower end of the market for databases. With this acquisition, Oracle has the possibility of “quietly” killing the MySQL development process and offer the current MySQL paying customer an opportunity to migrate towards its own database product. I don’t see Oracle maintaining two database product lines, especially if one is mainly “given away” for free. Even if existing Oracle customers may not be tempted by MySQL, this new database was always in consideration for startups. There were also some companies that tried to build upon MySQL the missing tools to bring it close to the power of Oracle products.

We expect a similar fate, silent slow death through lower financial support, for mainly of the other Sun’s technologies: NetBeans, GlassFish, JavaFX or OpenOffice. Oracle always want to get the most of the financial aspect of acquisitions and spending money on open source projects and technology that has low immediate return on investment is not something that it would consider, unless it could be used as a tactical weapon against some of its competitors, like Microsoft or SAP for instance.

Sun Press Release
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp

MySQL was forecasted to set an IPO this year, but it seems that with the difficult conditions of the stock market its initial investors have chosen the easy solution to cash their money by letting Sun acquire the company.

For Sun, who recently changed its NASDAQ stock ticker from SUN to JAVA, it is a confirmation that the new strategic direction is in software and services. This move is therefore an important step to transform itself more in a service oriented company. With MySQL, Sun acquires a fast-growing company that has already a dual open source-commercial approach. Its estimated 2007 revenues were around $70 million. It is also a quick and good ticket to enter the database market already occupied by its competitors (Microsoft, Oracle and IBM). We suppose that Sun will not touch a lot to the existing MySQL organization. Being backed by a bigger company will bring an increased credibility and a better sales channel. Sun could also provide additional resources to improve its product so that it will become a more fierce competitor against Oracle.

The acquisition could also help Sun to propose its own alternative to the open source Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) architecture. As it put its Solaris operating system in open source last year, it could propose a Solaris/Apache/MySQL/Java (SAMJ) pack that could be optimized. This could be a real alternative to the Windows ecosystem that is backed by a “old” company, thus allowing medium-size companies to have the impression to make a safer transition than with a pack of dispersed open source projects.

This move also changes the landscape for the other companies operating in the open source database area, like PostgreSQL and Ingres. However it is also a financial validation of the open source commercial model and some companies could end being the target of a bigger fish in the future. I will not be surprised if companies like Red Hat, HP… or Yahoo! will make some acquisitions in the sector in a near future.