Oracle Touts Cloud-Based Developer Tools As Java 9 Is Delayed

Oracle has detailed a suite of new cloud-based developer tools and touted improvements to Java 9 at the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco.

Larry Ellison’s firm said it wanted to make it easier for companies to create apps using cloud services and APIs that make use of analytics, mobile and the Internet of Things.

It emerged earlier this week that the release of Java 9 could be delayed again until July 2017, with Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, telling the OpenJDK mailing list, that there were several issues and more bugs at this stage than there was with Java 8.

Java 9 delay

But that didn’t stop Oracle from explaining to the OpenWorld audience how Project Jigsaw would allow for scalable, faster, more secure applications and how JShell would allow developers to run and test snippets of code more easily in the Standard Edition (SE) of Java 9.

Earler this week, Reinhold told the OpenJDK community, which comprises more than 500 organisations and individuals, that Project Jigsaw was one of the reasons why Java 9 had missed its most recent deadline of September 2016.

“Despite this progress, at this point it’s clear that Jigsaw needs more time,” Reinhold said. “We recently received critical feedback that motivated a redesign of the module system’s package-export feature, without which we’d have failed to achieve one of our main goals. There are, beyond that, still many open design issues, which will take time to work through.”

The company also said future editions of the Enterprise Edition (EE) would offer superior reactive programming, security, better container functionality and support more authentication models.

Cloud tools

In terms of cloud tools, the new Oracle MySQL Cloud Service allows for secure, scalable MySQL-based app development and deployment in the cloud, and the Oracle Application Container Cloud Service now has PHP support.

A similar service for cloud-based API development is also available, and Oracle has also improved its mobile suite with chatbot support and its Container Cloud Service expand Docker support and offers pre-built containerised images for its products.

The company is also releasing Project Visual Cloud, a platform that allows customers to expand SaaS applications with next to know coding knowledge. The modular tool provides components that can be used in custom apps or even Oracle’s own cloud apps for reusable applications.

“Businesses need to be dynamic to remain relevant in today’s fast-paced business environment,” said Bill Pataky, head of product management for tools and frameworks at Oracle.

“Project Visual Cloud introduces an effective way for business users to innovate in tandem with IT. It enables business users to extend and enrich off-the-shelf applications and build new solutions that can increase business efficiency and drive better results.”

During the first day of OpenWorld, executive chairman and CTO Ellison boldly claimed “Amazon’s lead is over” in the cloud market, taking aim with a “new generation” of data centres that offer more performance at a lower cost than Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Yesterday also saw a deluge of cloud-based announcements from Oracle, which came comparatively late to the cloud infrastructure market, launching the Oracle Cloud in 2012, some four years after AWS and Microsoft Azure and trailing offerings from HP, OpenStack and others.

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