JAVA Under Oracle: Seven Things You Need To Know

Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems (ticker symbol: JAVA) will give it control over two of the most widely used application development technologies in the industry: the Java platform and MySQL. Oracle can't say exactly what it intends to do with these software products until the deal closes, but Forrester predicts that the Java platform will become more narrowly focused, while MySQL will anchor Oracle's efforts to beat Microsoft at selling databases to small to medium-size enterprises. In addition, Oracle is likely to roll out a database machine that specializes in extreme database performance and scalability using Sun hardware and storage, an idea that CEO Larry Ellison has promoted for years. Shops that want to align with Oracle as their key Java vendor must start to understand Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), which are core to Oracle's platform and applications strategies. These are among the top seven things application development and program management pros need to know about an Oracle-Sun combination.