How twoey are youey?

Link: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris?entry=sun_the_web_1_0

Today I wrote a long post to my colleagues about SOA. It would have made a good blog post, but it's a comment on a work internal document so it can't be. It got forwarded up by my boss, so I hope the board are clerks fans.

We should be in the business of providing applications on a stupid network, not buying in smart middleware. Let ontologies emerge from what works, rather than being a more-meta-than-thou big design up-front.

I surfed straight from forum.java.sun to Jim Grisanzio's blog on Sun vs Web 2.0, and laughed out loud at the Much of Sun is very Web 2.0 and has been for decades, which reminded me way too much of I'm Brian and so is my wife. Since blogs.sun.com barfed when I tried to comment, I'll say here what I couldn't there - although my experience of opensolaris has been positive, as far as Sun's support for the Java the community forums are managed as though we were an annoyance who happen to buy the product, rather than being the value in the product.

In terms of selling Java (I've used the stuff for ten years, and sold RESTful Java based web apps + workflow as business service bus to my previous employers), it's been the community that's behind it that puts it ahead of .net as a platform. If Apache Tomcat, commons, Eclipse, Jackrabbit et al were based on a different technology, then Java wouldn't stand up. The chances are that someone's done something already to solve your problem in Java, but Sun's own forums suck very badly. Java.net does more community outreach, though its forums tend to be more project focussed, and it's more recent, at least from a has been for decades perspective. It's the java.sun.com forums which people first turn to, and are the first impression of Sun as a web2.0 company or not.

So I don't think that Sun's Java business particularly twoey, either from a community perspective or a technological one.

But then I'm an ex-Java programmer these days, so they might not care anyway.


TME