Fate of some Sun technologies still up in the air

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been fawning all over Sun Microsystems technologies lately, such as Java, the Solaris OS, the MySQL database, and the SPARC CPU platform. But it still remains to be seen how Oracle will deal with redundancies in the Java enterprise application server and IDE spaces once Sun becomes part of Oracle.

The merger between the two companies currently is pending. At the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference in San Francisco on Monday, Oracle promoted planned advancements in the WebLogic application server platform it inherited from its 2008 acquisition of BEA systems, involving modularization and support of OSGi technology.

[ Earlier today, Oracle's Ellison and Sun's Scott McNealy vowed that Sun's technologies would live on post-merger. Also at OpenWorld, Oracle highlighted its efforts to integrate technology it has acquired recently. ]

Shortly thereafter, in another OpenWorld presentation, James Gosling, a Sun vice president considered the father of Java, hailed Sun's own open source GlassFish application server. "The adoption of Glassfish is pretty amazing," Gosling said. Deployments have taken place all over the world, and the technology is used for mission-critical systems, he said, noting that "it's running at about a million downloads a month."

Oracle already has made WebLogic its core Java server while putting its own application server, which it owned prior to the BEA buy, in support mode. That application server is now called Oracle Container for Java.

Gosling also touted the NetBeans IDE Monday, which rivals the Eclipse IDE that has been backed by Oracle.  Additionally, Oracle has its own JDeveloper IDE.  Gosling called NetBeans a top-of-the-line IDE and said he was "a huge NetBeans fan."

If the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun goes through, Oracle would have to either find a place for GlassFish and NetBeans in its product roster or could spin them out. Thus far, Oracle has expressed strong commitments to Sun technologies while not addressing, specifically, what would happen with technologies such as GlassFish and NetBeans.

Asked if he was concerned about Oracle's commitment to NetBeans and Glassfish, Gosling deferred to Oracle.  "I have no data one way or the other," Gosling said.

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