October 30, 2009

Oracle's drip feed of promises on Sun Microsystems' software has now extended to middleware, open-source, and tools. The database giant has said it will continue Sun's investment in the company's open-source Java application server.

"Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and Glassfish Enterprise server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise customers," the company's said in a PDF here. As is Oracle's way, it did not provide further details. The roll-call of promises updates the earlier revision that saw Oracle pledge to continue investing in the open-source MySQL database.

One former BEA Systems executive who stewarded WebLogic development before Oracle's acquisition told The Reg Thursday that there's certainly potential for "alignment" between WebLogic and GlassFish. He pointed to a common management and security framework as one opportunity

Peter Cooper-Ellis, former executive vice president of engineering at BEA, said integration could also be made potentially easier if Oracle stuck to its recently stated plan to make WebLogic modular using the OSGi specification and framework. If this was applied to GlassFish too, then the application servers could - theoretically - share modules.

Just because WebLogic and GlassFish use Java 2 Enterprise Edition (Java EE) doesn't make a common infrastructure easy because of the different way the specification has been implemented in the Oracle and BEA containers. Cooper-Ellis, now vice president of engineering at the SpringSource division of VMware, said GlassFish would probably gain the most from a features perspective, as WebLogic was such a fully featured application server. Since the deal, Oracle has taken WebLogic further with the addition of support for Coherehce for data management and caching services in clustered environments.

He also sounded a note of caution: While Oracle has promised continued investment - as it has on MySQL - the proof will be in the money, man hours, and breadth of support the giant pours in. "The question is if they [Oracle] invest in GlassFish or pay lip service and don't really invest that much," Cooper-Ellis said.

Source:- http://news.cnet.com