Oracle goes full Microsoft

Oracle goes full Microsoft

Open source claims another victim

Previously there was significant difference in the way Oracle (Sun) and Microsoft treated their developers.

Microsoft strived to keep developers junior at all times. Every couple years they changed the API and tools and pushed seasoned developers into learning mode and lower pay bracket again.

Oracle used to be different. One can make a career doing Java against Oracle DB server. Not anymore. As soon as Java went open source with JavaFX, it was over.

JavaFX is now open source. That means no standards, no documentation, no responsibility of developers for the end result of their work. They can introduce any ideas no matter how crazy, introduce bugs no matter how bad and there is no way in hell to get them fix any of that.

JavaFX is CSS-stylable. That means that instead of a trivial simple call to change color, font, background image etc on a control, the following will have to happen:

1. You will have to learn JavaFX specific CSS schema.
2. You will have to write a stylesheet for each of your components.
3. Your program will have to load and parse CSS at runtime.

Clearly, memorizing another computer language on top of Java means you are back to school, i.e. you are a junior developer again.

Stylesheets cannot be debugged - if there is a problem with them, you will just have to guess your way around the issues.

Keeping plain text in RAM and parsing it at runtime takes several powers of 10 more bytes and CPU cycles. This is what our more and more powerful computers have to be used for - to satisfy the urge of the open source developers for ever higher levels of sophistication for the sake of sophistication.

JavaFX is incompatible with everything Oracle developed previously. Its TableView for example, cannot be populated directly from a SQL ResultSet, as ResultSet provides access to the data rows via getRow() where recordset has to be first positioned with next() etc methods. If only Oracle bothered to provide an iterator support for the list controls, it would have worked. Guess too much trouble.

There goes Oracle. Or are they just preparing to sell Java altogether? To Microsoft? So that it can bury it and have everyone write in C#?

Look at what they did in JavaFX in JDK 8:

• Shapes support only Phong Material, which only supports one diff map per shape. No tiled or animated textures for you.
• Transitions cannot talk to each other, as no events are exposed that could allow further transition to grab the end result of the previous.
• Timelines do not fire events when they are stopped or paused.
• Scene is entirely loaded into memory, regardless of culling, i.e. culled surfaces still occupy main RAM.
• The only shapes in JavaFX 3D API are (sic!) cylinder (not truncated cone), sphere (not toroid) and box (not prism).
• There is no arbitrary size triangle mesh, even flat one.
• No fog.
• No particles.
• No opacity.
• No shadows.

Oracle should be ashamed of itself for releasing a developer preview (which is rumored to be the finished product with only bug fixes pending) with such deficiencies, no documentation and complete showstopper bugs, while their developers are going out of their way to deny bug reports and refuse to fix them on ridiculous premises.

Here's what their lead engineers wrote in a bug tracker:

I am unable to reproduce the issue using your attached sample application, as I do not have the Oracle 11g Express demo database installed.

That's the same as if a Microsoft techie told you that he did not have MS SQL Server with NorthWind. ROFLMAO.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 03:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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