Why is SUN ignoring PHP, Groovy and other languages?
January 19, 2008
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Sun for many moons. They give us OpenOffice, Java, etc. on the one hand, but then come up with byzantine licensing structures (CDDL was Sun, right? and SCSL was for sure) and get antagonistic towards JBoss and others on occasion. Ultimately, trying to ascribe a single mindset to Sun is not possible, just like IBM, MS and other mega-companies. However, I was reminded of this issue again just now browsing dzone.com’s comments on a ‘drop JRuby support’ article. Planetcmd wrote:
But lets be honest, Sun has ^*&^&*)loads of money and only has a couple of developers working on it. I think the real question is how come they’re not devoting equal or more to other JVM languages? Including Jython, Scala, and groovy. They dug up a billion bucks for MySQL.
Exactl y my sentiments. MS really is really making great strides with C#, yet we get very little in terms of Java progression, and there are issues with Apple (Java6 still isn’t available on Macs). For years I heard that “the JVM supports hundreds of languages!” I was hearing this as both theoretical advantage and practical advice as far back as 2001. Yet MS took the lead because they introduced a VM with and handful of solid languages for their .NET VM which appealed to different audiences (vb.net and c# being the mostly widely used). We’ve slowly seen the evolution of groovy, jruby and a few others on the JVM which could be practical alternatives to Java the language running on the JVM, but we see precious few resources from Sun to attack that market. If you don’t court developers, you will lose marketshare over the long haul. The rise of ‘dynamic’ languages (Ruby, Python, and I’d throw PHP in there certainly as well) has shown what’s possible, but there’s little activity from Sun to address the needs of these developers.
So, why should they bother? What’s in it for them? I don’t really have a good answer for this. Just thinking out loud here: Beyond the long term branding and goodwill that sort of support generates, there’s the services and support model, as well as Sun hardware which people may need to grow in to. Open Source generally commoditizes (?) the need for specific hardware - there’s little *need* for me to run any of my apps on Sun hardware. However, that’s just me. Plenty more people may need (or do need ) that sort of support and hardware. Ultimately, the software stack can dictate the mindset of people looking for their hardware and support. An all MS shop, which evolved that way because of the software stack, is highly unlikely to ever look at Sun hardware for any of their needs. Not saying it wouldn’t happen, just highly unlikely. A Java or Unix-based shop would be more likely to look at Sun hardware.
Am I simplifying this too much?
It’s painful to watch Sun *not* support the next generation of languages in a more aggressive fashion (meaning with real money and support and resources). Given that they found a billion dollars to acquire an open source db (mysql), I’d imagine there’s a few million laying around that could be funneled in to language development and support. Java itself isn’t going to get many radical changes in the near future, but languages on top of the JVM will likely be the next area of innovation. Sun seems to be throwing all of its (few) resources in to JRuby, ignoring the other players. IBM is working on a PHP->JVM project, and it’s working pretty well from what I see. Why has Sun ignored that market? It’s easy to just say Sun is jumping on the RoR bandwagon with their support of JRuby, and it’s hard to counter when they seemingly give little effort to expanding the useful universe of JVM languages on their own platform.
Thoughts?
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January 19th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I think it’s simple: PHP is the worse sample of how to do an open source project. Lack of transparency from PHP Group: the fact that no one knows a date for future release or what features are planned and so on.
January 20th, 2008 at 5:59 am
Sun’s JVM and hardware favours languages and packages that can benefit from massive multi-threading. Rails is an application server architecture, which suits the JVM perfectly. The best way to get massive MySQL performance is to run it on Sun’s Niagara hardware.
PHP, by contrast, runs better on Intel/AMD hardware because it’s single threaded and loves “straight line” performance. That, and the fact that PHP is considered a toy language in most professional enterprise shops (a label that it does not deserve!), means that (for the moment) there is no benefit to Sun in putting a lot of weight behind PHP.
To improve future business, Sun needs to get a toe hold back in web hosting data centres. The best way by far to do that is to buy MySQL. Oh look - Sun have already done that
Best regards,
Stu
January 20th, 2008 at 7:55 am
a) MySQL is not only buying the database but also the paying customers. This is not possible with PHP as there are no paying customers, and sponsoring the project is hard with PHP since there is no legal entity to sponsor and company’s don’t like sponsoring random inidividuals. And the primary goal o a regular company is making profits, not making the world a better place.
b) SUN will soon have the PHP 5.3 release manager on the payroll since I’m working at MySQL for a few months now. So they are sponsoring PHP
January 27th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
> Java6 still isn’t available on Macs
If I remember correctly, Sun was originally going to work on porting and packaging Java for OS X, but Apple said that they wanted to control the process. I’m sure if it were up to Sun, Java 6 would be working fine on OS X.