Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in InfoWorld. Dear Jonathan, Long time no see! The same way you enjoy writing open letters to IBM and others in your blog -- I wanted to write an open letter to you and Sun, and see if I can get a little clarity about your open source software strategy. As I am sure you have noticed, there has been quite a bit of momentum around LAMP in the industry, ranging from innovators like Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, to the "Web 2.0" crowd like Friendster, MySpace, and Flickr. In addition, LAMP has increasing usage in the enterprise. The "P" languages in LAMP -- PHP, Python, and Perl -- are all open source, and each provide their own virtual machine. It would be ideal if the Java JVM was open source so that open source projects like PHP could join up with the Java Virtual Machine. In turn, Java would be much more competitive with .Net, which supports numerous languages out of the box. Initiatives like adding dynamic language support in the JV

This post was also published in InfoWorld. During my five year tenure at Sun, Graham Hamilton, the Java CTO, killed every initiative to run scripting languages on the Java Virtual Machine. These include 1999's "javab", which would have run Visual BASIC syntax on the JVM, and 2003's "Java 3", which would have supported optional typelessness for Java objects. Clearly, the industry trend towards scripting languages like PHP and Ruby has finally had an effect, since Graham has recently sponsored JSR 292: Supporting Dynamically Typed Languages on the JavaTM Platform . The time lag here is similar to the time lag it took Graham to support SOAP in favor of RMI after a ton of resistance, which Sun paid for dearly when they had minimal impact in the development of the web service standards we use today. It's great that Sun has finally decided to support scripting languages in some way in the next couple of years. However it is clear that this change was