Oracle's long-term agenda for Java may come into focus next week as the company plans to place Sun's application development technology in the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 spotlight, beginning with Sunday's keynote, which will feature Sun Chairman Scott McNealy and Sun Vice President James Gosling, considered the father of Java, alongside Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
Set to acquire Java founder Sun Microsystems, Oracle will soon assume the mantle of leadership in Java technology development, and many will look to this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco as a guide to how Oracle will steward the technology in the post-acquisition era. Analysts believe the show will shed light on those plans, although Java will not likely be the dominant theme of the event.
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On the docket are further discussions as to how Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g will support the future of Java middleware. Oracle has announced that the suite, which is based on technology from the company's 2008 acquisition of BEA Systems, will branch out into grid architectures, virtualization, and cloud computing -- plans that the company promises to outline at the show.
Also on the agenda are two Fusion Development Platform sessions, one to compare application development in Oracle Application Express and J2EE, and the other to focus on Oracle's Java IDE, JDeveloper.
But the show itself will center mostly on Oracle's Fusion Middleware 11g platform and Fusion, said Kenneth Chin, an analyst at Gartner who covers Oracle. Chin said he was not aware of any major Java announcements planned for the event, although there could be some surprises.
"I think the show will be focused on Fusion middleware," specifically in the BPM and content management spaces, Chin said.
(Ellison recently declared Oracle would not spin off the Sun-owned MySQL database, despite concerns by the European Union about the company's ownership of the open source technology.)
Java, of course, already has been the subject of the JavaOne conference held in San Francisco in June. While there has been speculation about the future of that event given Oracle's pending ownership of Sun, and the company's ongoing emphasis on Oracle OpenWorld, Chin said he anticipates that JavaOne will continue.
"I think they would probably want to maintain the Java events," Chin said, adding that Oracle will not want to be perceived as controlling the future of Java.
Other Java-related sessions at the event include "Developing Microsoft Office Front Ends for Enterprise Java Applications" and "Productive Java Persistence API and JavaServer Faces Development with Oracle JDeveloper."
Oracle will also offer its perspective on Linux, with Linux and virtualization news planned for the event.
Notable among third parties presenting app dev technologies at the event is Alpha Software, which plans to demonstrate its "codeless AJAX" development tool.
This story, "OpenWorld to shed light on Oracle's Java plans," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application developement at InfoWorld.com.