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.

IBM buying Sun?

Some news sites (1, 2) today are reporting that IBM is in talks to buy Sun in a deal for at least $6.5 billion.

Off course this is some interesting news and might have some impact on Java and Java related products from Sun (GlassFish, NetBeans, ...). The future will tell us.

The reason I'm blogging about this that I'm believing for years that Oracle's Larry Ellison would step up one day and buy Sun. It would make a lot of sense in my opionion. Oracle is really attached to Java and they are involved in many JSR's. With buying Sun and thus Java they would have real strong voice in which Java would be heading. They would also have their own operating system which is one the less things they don't have at the moment. You can then have a stack like Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Application Server and Oracle Applications. And there is a lot more, think about MySQL!

For once and all I want to write down this prediction, so if it would happen once (and this seems not the case right now) I can tell I had predicted it ;-).

PS: If I had a chrystal ball I was bying a lotery ticket right now.