EnterpriseDB is talking about standards in the contest of PAAS (platform as a service). Looking at the forefront of a paradigm shift with cloud.

Java has been number one on the tiobe index for five years. Objective C is currently at number eight. It is an interesting measure because it uses number of jobs, books, etc to calculate rankings.  Java was an evolution of C++ and solved a problem.

Evolution needs to happen or there is that opportunity for something else to replace it.

J2EE was successful because the major companies backed it on day one. Part succeeded (servlets) while art failed (ejb) [jdbc listed as success, but that isn’t jee]. EJB was too complex and alternatives came up like Hibernate and Spring.   The speaker did credit the mess up of EJB with people adopting Spring.

“open source became an alternative to a deficient standard”

Success criteria: solve a problem, developers love, standardize, be open source, be first. Do not need all of these, but more help.  Also listed Microsoft support as a benefit

There were a few typos in the presentation which i found distracting.  Basically the session was a history lesson with some interesting points. I was relieved was not a sales pitch.

Once people move on, they don’t come back. Even though EJB 3.1 is “as good as” Spring, people have already switched.
Who will own the cloud? Who knows? Time will tell.