Avinash Meetoo

Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems!!!

20 April 2009 By Avinash Meetoo 18 Comments

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Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

Oracle gets (among other things):

Java (including NetBeans)
Solaris
MySQL
SPARC
VirtualBox

Oracle already has:

Oracle database
Oracle application server
JDeveloper and SQL Developer
eBusiness Suite / Peoplesoft / Siebel / J.D. Edwards
Unbreakable Linux (which is an Oracle-supported Redhat Enterprise Linux)

I wonder what the Google, IBM and Microsoft guys are thinking right now… This acquisition has the potential to be a masterstroke in our era of utility computing:

Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network). This system has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire hardware; instead, computational resources are essentially rented. Customers with very large computations or a sudden peak in demand can also avoid the delays that would result from physically acquiring and assembling a large number of computers.

and cloud computing:

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. The concept incorporates infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) as well as Web 2.0 and other recent technology trends that have the common theme of reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.

I can easily imagine Oracle using hardware technology from Sun and Solaris to provide utility computing services (Sun already has a grid.) And, of course, I can easily imagine Oracle deploying its business suites (eBusiness Suite / Peoplesoft / Siebel / J.D. Edwards) and a lot of other applications on that infrastructure.

Exciting times ahead. Let’s hope that everything which is open source remains truly open source.

Let us be discerning pirates!

18 April 2009 By Avinash Meetoo 32 Comments

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Yesterday, four people providing the The Pirate Bay service were sentenced to 1 year of emprisonment and a $905,000 fine each. The reason? For assisting in making copyright content available.

According to Wikipedia, “The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that indexes, stores and tracks BitTorrent files. It bills itself as the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.” In essence, The Pirate Bay allows people to search for and download files (audio, video, software, etc.) using peer-to-peer technology but does not host the files themselves. Naturally, and it’s stupid being hypocrites, most people use the service to download copyrighted material (MP3, DivX, etc.)

From an ethical point of view, I am against copyright violation. I believe that those who create should decide whether people should pay or not to get access to their creations. Some of them will decide that people need to pay (that’s fine!) and some will decide that their creations can be redistributed freely (that’s excellent!) And, from an ethical point of view, it’s important that people respect the will of creators or risk demotivating them. And without creations to enjoy, what is our existence worth?

From a pragmatic point of view, I like The Pirate Bay (Paulo Coelho is a fan too.) It’s important for people to be able to try things before they buy. For instance, as an avid user of Last.fm and Rate Your Music, I regularly come across new albums and I am happy that something like The Pirate Bay exists which allows me to download the albums and evaluate them before (eventually) buying them…

Because of this, I hope The Pirate Bay will survive (or something similar will emerge.)

To be frank, I only buy a few albums now because, well, obtaining them (more or less) freely is so painless. Music companies could have made their music collection downloadable at a very low price (say, of the order of Rs 100 ($3) per album) and I’m sure that a lot more people would have bought albums. In fact, if the music companies had intelligent people at their helm, they would have embraced P2P instead of condemning it because P2P solves the technical problem of delivering content in a scalable way.

The other day, I was listening to a French artist, AnaÃ¯s Croze, on TV and she was asked about piracy. She said something extremely interesting. As an artist, she is not happy about piracy. But the reason she gave was extremely interesting. She said that most people use P2P to download music but do not spend time listening. And she was afraid that we were losing our insight and understanding of music as a consequence…

I have to agree. Downloading music is a means towards discovering new horizons. It’s not an end. It’s not about filling our hard disks with thousands and thousands of MP3 and never listening and appreciating them. Music is about emotion. Not about codecs.

Let us be discerning pirates!

Java training course starting next Monday 20 April

14 April 2009 By Avinash Meetoo 13 Comments

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A few weeks ago, I blogged about the imminent start of our MQA-approved Object-Oriented Programming in Java course next Monday 20 April. The topics which are going to be covered in depth are:

Object-oriented analysis, design and programming
The Java programming language
The Java class library including Collections and Input/Output
Generics and Multithreading
Unit testing (including the use of JUnit and mock objects)

Notice that the focus is both on object-orientation as well as Java. In my opinion, someone who aspire to eventually master enterprise technologies like Struts, Spring and Hibernate needs to have both skills.

Designing object-oriented software is hard. Expert designers know not to do is solve every problem from first principles. They reuse solutions that have worked before. That is why I am putting so much emphasis on sound object-oriented design principles (including the use of design patterns.)

In the coming weeks, Knowledge Seven Ltd will launch two further Java courses which will build upon this foundation Object-Oriented Programming in Java course:

Web Application Development in Java with a focus on presentation layer technologies such as Servlets, Struts 2 and possibly innovative frameworks such as Wicket. The objective is to allow the trainee to build a complete 2-tier web application using JDBC for persistence.
Entreprise Java with Spring and Hibernate with a focus on using Spring and Hibernate to build a complete 3-tier enterprise application. The trainee will use the facilities found in Spring (including dependency injection and AOP) to build the domain logic layer of the application. He/she will also use the object-relational mapping facilities of Hibernate for data persistence.

These two courses are intensive and the trainee(s) will have to possess a good mastery of object-orientation and Java in order to follow them satisfactorily (for example, by following this Object-Oriented Programming in Java course.) In fact, I have purposely designed the three courses to be complementary.

There are still seats left and it would be a pleasure for us to train you or people from your company. Do not hesitate to contact us!