Fiquei devendo um apanhado geral do JavaOne que rolou mês passado em Frisco. Confesso que fiquei meio decepcionado. Ou então minhas fontes estão meio fraquinhas. Mas eu esperava mais 'barulho'. Vou destacar um trecho do último artigo do David Berlind (ZDNet) sobre o evento:

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At the extreme right end of the spectrum (scoring the best) is BEA. In hopes of wagging the dog by the tail, BEA has long given away its WorkShop IDE. So, like Eclipse, WorkShop is free. But now, it does something else like Eclipse. It uses the same underlying framework. This means that plug-ins designed for Eclipse will also work in WorkShop and vice versa. Now, Eclipse developers can try Workshop without sacrificing Eclipse plug-ins. If they like it, they might even see some WebLogic stuff that they want to try out, which could mean new WebLogic customers. But just in case Eclipse developers don't want to give WorkShop a try, BEA is making sure that they still have access to largely WebLogic-esque technologies like Beehive. Still not enough? Well, to get people interested in WorkShop (which in turn might get them interested in WebLogic), BEA is making sure that WorkShop supports Apache's open-sourced Tomcat and Geronimo too, as well as two other popular open-sourced Java frameworks known as Struts and Spring. Those "support" offerings could end up as revenue on BEA's bottom line since there aren't many places for developers to go for such support.

Next down the line (heading to the left) is IBM. IBM doesn't have to do anything to be Eclipse-esque. Given Eclipse's roots in WSAD, it is already natively so. But, whereas BEA's WorkShop is free, the full-blown version of WSAD is not. BEA may be forcing IBM's hand; and, to develop interest in WebSphere, IBM may end up making WSAD available for nothing. It will be interesting to see where this heads.

Next down the line is Oracle. At JavaOne this year, Oracle announced that it was going to start giving away its IDE. So, yet another free IDE. Only there's a problem. It's not based on the Eclipse framework and Oracle has no plans to go there. This is a problem from a plug-in perspective because "free" is simply not enough incentive to draw away developers who are already using Eclipse or one of the other Eclipse-based IDEs from BEA and Borland. In a move that saves some face — slightly bridging Eclipse to JDeveloper — Oracle is making sure that both Eclipse and JDeveloper developers have access to the same Java Server Faces (JSF) and Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 tools. This equates to a third-party developer developing separate plug-ins for two IDEs where it could have stuck to one. Since JDeveloper is free, the EJB and JSF support probably won't cost you anything as a part of JDevelper. But when asked if the corresponding plug-ins for Eclipse will be open-sourced, the answer was that pricing wasn't yet set. Prediction: With Borland and BEA on the Eclipse framework and with Workshop also available for free, "free" did not put JDeveloper into the game. Expect Oracle to look for ways to get JDeveloper on the Eclipse framework so it only has to worry about one plug-in architecture (and that all the existing Eclipse plug-ins work on it). They'll give that away and they'll also give away some plug-ins that work on Eclipse in hopes of wagging its dogs by the tails: selling more of Oracle application and database servers.

Then there's Sybase–one of the other vendors I spoke to. Sybase appears to be in the rather unfortunate position of just now figuring out it has to play in an open world. Sybase is an example of a company that remains nearly entirely proprietary — virtually all the way on the left end of the spectrum. To get some game, the company announced that it will be building an SOA plug-in for Eclipse called WorkSpace. That's it. No open sourcing of any tools. Nothing new for free. Just an announcement that it has some plug-in that itself represents some several integrated tools that Sybase saw no value in unbundling as separate Eclipse tools. In my interview of Sybase's executives, I was told that the integration that Eclipse does between plug-ins wasn't good enough. By itself, the announcement isn't all that bad. But looking off to the right end of the spectrum…..

Resumindo: dê os IDEs e espere que os programadores influenciem na aquisição dos servidores de aplicações. Caramba.. que falta de criatividade! E quem disse que os desenvolvedores têm tal "Força"?

E quem disse que a definição de uma arquitetura de aplicações começa pelo IDE? Sad, Sad...