Oracle Magazine: Survey Says

Oracle Magazine (July/August 2011) has a Community Bulletin by Justin Kestelyn. The article details a survey performed on community members (not sure that I took this one, but I generally do take their surveys) about what they want and need from Oracle Technology Network (OTN) and Java.net (not mentioned, but applies). The overall rating was "Good" which I think is a fair assessment. I am happy that the Sun Developer Network (SDN) was merged into OTN. They still need to have a number of links fixed, but in fairness some may have been previously broken. Google often resolves this from a cached version of the link you are looking for if it is broken.

I am very thankful for the upgrades to Java.net, and the continuing support to make it better.

One of the items was the lack of attendance at Virtual Developer Days and Developer days. I have attended a few of them, and some have been very good. It is a gem in the rough, and I think that more developers should attend one to decide on their value. One note is to remove any sales/marketing people from the events. If I like your tech, I will follow-up with your sales people. Marketers are welcome to listen in (mute), but I would like "Marketers are to be unseen and unheard." Please don't misconstrue my remarks to mean these are vendor talks my fellow developers... the sales and marketing people are just sometimes at the events too.

The benefits of membership are not clear on OTN, or Java.net. These should be more prominent.

I was surprised that newsletters were ranked higher than sample code. Who doesn't like good sample code!

Rewards points was a surprise. I can see one thing that Sun did well and Oracle has not gotten down quite yet: T-Shirts. I know it is hard to believe, but we developer like swag, and t-shirts are like a badge of honor. A manager at my former company asked  "Why do you always wear Sun shirts? Why don't you wear our company shirts?" My response was simple: "When you start giving out our shirts for free, I will start wearing them!"

I think that Java.net and OTN are doing good work, and as a community member I would like to thank the teams who make it work everyday. Thanks and keep up the good work.

NetBeans IDE (I Don't Envy) Oracle Question

oRAclE by Bert Breeman

Last week I was an attendee at the IOUC/JUG Leaders Summit held at Oracle. During the course of the week, we had a couple of presentations where it was mentioned that Oracle would continue to enhance JDeveloper, and provide resources for NetBeans.

Curiously, the presenters mentioned Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) a number of times. The disturbing part was that it was mentioned twice (I am sure of it) was that Oracle is a good friend to the Eclipse community, and sits on the Eclipse Foundation Board. The other JUG leaders also took note of it, and it was a dinner and drinks topic. The other leaders noted it, but we all decided that it was "true" so nothing more came of it.

Let us advance a couple of days...

I see a twitter message about dropping Ruby support in NetBeans. The room was probably not even clean yet from the conference when the announcement came out. Oracle had very carefully crafted the event, topics, discussions (except the un-conference), etc. It was very well done. The respective executives, directors, department heads, and technical leads were present. Every "i" dotted, and every "o" covered. A well "O"iled machine. The JUG leaders are largely NetBeans users though some use other IDEs like Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA. This would have been important to a number of us (including me). It IS possible that someone at Oracle missed the communications stream, and failed to mention it at a large meeting. This IS possible. I don't want to spread FUD, but if it is a major miss by Oracle communications. It is like the picture above...lacking a few letters.

Here is some information that is NOT FUD:

To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release
themes--multi-language support, developer productivity and
performance--it is necessary that our engineering resources are
committed to a timely and quality release of NetBeans IDE 7.0. 

Second: Although our Ruby support has historically been well received,
based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the
continued allocation of resources to support the feature.

The bold sections above seem to contradict the stated support by Oracle of the NetBeans team.

The Grand Canyon was started as a trickle that eroded a rock solid foundation.  Seventeen million years ago we could have have hopped the stream. Today there is no way to close the gap, and the rift continues.  My question is this the trickle?