Gosling is Gone

James Gosling, creator of Java, has quit from Oracle. He announced this on his blog. Strangely enough, his blog has disappeared. I guess they chop your blog at Oracle when you leave.

Gosling did not provide a reason for leaving. Hello? Can you say Oracle acquisition? He is going to take some time off.

Word on the street is that the Java faithful were taken by surprise. Does this mean that Gosling will not be present at JavaOne? You got to go and find out.

Oracle Plans

Oracle Corporation has a number of plans for the future of Java. They plan to merge the HotSpot and JRockit JVMs into one product next year. They also will be supporting languages other than Java in the JVM. These will include Ruby and Python.

There is also talk that the Java SE and Java ME platforms will merge into one. Perhaps that means that mobile apps are becoming common. It is either that or mobile apps are not as important any more.

The JavaOne conference is going to be held in tandem with the OpenWorld conference. You can register and attend events at both conferences. JavaOne will now be held in the September time frame. I guess Oracle has decided what has the precedence. At least they are not ending JavaOne.

JavaOne Contest Dud

Sun Microsystems hosted a contest that turned out sour for me. You had to blog about JavaOne 2009 technical sessions. I did not attend JavaOne. This was not supposed to be a problem as they post the technical sessions online.

I opted to view the JavaOne technical sessions as PDF documents. Sun makes you sign up for their Sun Developer Network (SDN) to view the PDFs. This seemed like a hassle. But it was free so I decided to go through the motions. I created a new account. The directions told me to respond to an e-mail to confirm my address.

Here's the thing. I never received the e-mail. It is bad enough that I had to go through these hoops to access the technical content. But some glitch resulted in the process not working. Yeah I could try again. Why should I? This is going to take some time and might not even work again. My time is worth money. Now I don't want to blog about JavaOne technical info. Fail.