Ever since Oracle took over Java from Sun Microsystem, its been a rough journey. Lots of open source projects depending on java have been agitated by the proposed policies Oracle hopes to implement in upcoming Java releases.
It wanted to bring in modularisation and licensing plans for Java with version eight under the handle of something called Project Jigsaw. But some of the Java contributors are worried that Project Jigsaw conflicts with the OSGi module system already geared to Java. Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu Linux, is really cross that Oracle is no longer letting Linux distributors redistribute Oracle’s own commercial Java and is causing difficulties for the company.
On paper Jigsaw looks very good. Oracle intends to provide an approachable and scalable module system for large legacy software systems in general and the Java Development Kit. But this conflicts with OSGi, a long-standing dynamic module system for Java. This has been adopted by groups like the Eclipse Foundation for open source tools.
Eclipse spokesman Ian Skerrett told Info-World that Project Jigsaw risks supplanting an incumbent Java modularity system that has already seen a great deal of success. He said that OSGi is widely used across the Java ecosystem in the implementations of IDEs, enterprise service buses, and application servers. Not only does Project Jigsaw need to support the modularization of the Java platform, it must provide integration with the existing OSGi ecosystem, he said.
