The prophecy has come true! SpringSource next?

This aftenoon I received an e-mail from an old colleague that the Prophecy has come true (he was calling me Morpheus ;-): Oracle announced it entered into an agreement to acquire Sun.

Cool that just 1 month ago I finally blogged about this! I was thinking about this for years. I guess Mr. Larry Ellison had finally found my personal blog then ;-)

But seriously, what will this merger mean for us Java developers and for IT industry in general? In the past Oracle and Sun were very complementary, but the last years they became competitors also. Think about Sun acquiring MySQL and Oracle acquiring BEA Systems (including it's J2EE BEA WebLogic application server).

I guess Oracle will try to keep Java adopted as much as possible (it's in their own interest), but I don't think this will count for MySQL and GlassFish. I guess we will see a lot of other products being merged in the future, like NetBeans and JDeveloper. Time will tell, but it will definitely have some impact!

I will end with some new prophecies:

• Within 2 years Grails will be the leading platform for Java web development.


• Groovy will be the most dominant dynamic language on the JVM (Uhhhh, actually I don't think this is a prophecy but reality already).


• By 2012 a lot of Java developers are using Groovy without even knowing they are actually using Groovy.


• Someday Oracle will buy SpringSource.


• Very soon there will be a nice Groovy module for easily developing small Google App Engine applications.

Java support on Google App Engine

Just read the first blog posts (Google App Engine Blog, GR8 Conference, The Aquarium) about the announcement that Java is the next programming language supported on Google App Engine.

This is so funny, as I think just before Google released the announcement I put a question on the Google App Engine discussion group about when we can expect the new language and which language it would be. So my qusetion is answered now.

Since Google App Engine was announced I've always followed it with interest. I'm really excited/interested in the Cloud computing model so I don't have to maintain a deployment server/server park myself. Also the fact that I will just use more resources on the cloud infrastructure when my application needs is just great. I don't have create a cluster or whatever myself.

The reason I put the question on the forum yesterday was that I'm working on a small personal application I like to host on the internet somewhere in the future. Important thing is that the hosting has to be cheap when starting up. I've looked into Mor.ph but it would still cost me $31 a month to host my Java application. This does not sound expensive, buy hey I'm not a business!

In the past I hosted a couple of PHP websites using Drupal and I must say good PHP hosting is cheap and works very good. So I was already thinking of alternative scenario to develop my application in PHP, and not in Grails ;-(
I had already downloaded CakePHP and was experimenting a bit with it. I must say CakePHP is really easy to learn for Grails developers as it uses a lot of the same concepts as Grails and also RoR.

But with the annoucement of Google that Java will be supported I will be putting my PHP alternative in the fridge again. Also a very big plus that SpringSource's Groovy team has worked together with Google to make sure Groovy works well on Google App Engine. Let't hope the same thing counts for Grails one day.