Much of the news in the app dev world this week will be emanating from the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. Whereas a decade ago the big news from the show was geared at developers using or considering the upstart programming language, these days the big news tends to have an enterprise and service-oriented architecture focus.
I suppose it's indicative of a technology that's grown up. Yet maturity also gets you closer to obsolescence in the IT world. Sun Microsystems took a bold step at the 2006 JavaOne conference to announce that it plans to open source Java. Much of this year's conference will revolve around how well that initiative, along with Sun's plans to open source its integration middleware, is going.
Of course a lot has happened since last year. Java EE 5 was released. Almost immediately analysts began to question whether the enterprise platform had become too bloated to survive in an agile SOA world. Vendors, not surprisingly, insisted the Java enterprise platform would endure, though they acknowledged it will be in for some radical evolution.
Lost in the kerfuffle was the fact that Java EE 5 had already gone out of its way to become more SOA compliant. Meanwhile Java SE 6 was released and some viewed that as a preferable development choice for lightweight components to play inside of Web services.
The major vendors in the Java community are the major vendors in the SOA community, Microsoft excepted. Heck, they're the major vendors in the software community, Microsoft excepted. There's a lot of wealthy and smart people trying to figure out how to evolve Java so that it stays relevant in an integrated, loosely coupled world.
We at SearchWebServices.com will be bringing you the breaking news from this week's event and talking to the heavyweights in attendance about SOA and Java and interoperability and the next set of waves likely to crash upon your shores.
