At Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne this week, the software development industry was on hand to show off its new tools and to comment on Oracle’s myriad announcements. Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison doubled-down on cloud technologies, offering more cloud services, a cloud-in-a-box on-premise system, and a road map for Java EE.

On the outside, this would seem to contradict the point Ellison made less than 10 years ago that the cloud was a fad and not worth Oracle’s time. Indeed, these new Oracle cloud service offerings seem to contradict typical Oracle’s game plans, as great emphasis was placed on the openness of these new products.

Specifically, Oracle mentioned that developers could now spin up instances of Apache Cassandra, MongoDB and MySQL with the click of a button inside its cloud. That’s news to Kelly Stirman, vice president of strategy and product marketing for MongoDB.

Stirman said that Oracle had built such supports itself, and that it never contacted MongoDB about the project. He also questioned exactly what Oracle means when it hinted at bringing greater NoSQL support to Java EE.

“I’m not sure what’s missing,” said Stirman of Java EE NoSQL support as it stands today. “From that perspective, NoSQL is more or less meaningless. It’s not a thing; it’s a label for things that aren’t something. The interfaces to MongoDB, Cassandra and Redis are all vastly different. While I appreciate a lot of developers don’t want to use a RESTful interface and want first-class native drivers, I’m not sure what that would look like in a JSR. For MongoDB, our drivers are incredibly rich and sophisticated. It sounds more like Oracle trying to get on the NoSQL bandwagon.”

Waratek helps companies update their Java
Elsewhere at the show, big businesses and enterprises were on the lookout for ways to improve the security of their applications, as online threats continue to expand. One company there to help them with that problem was Waratek.

John Matthew Holt, CTO of Waratek, said that many companies aren’t necessarily using the latest and greatest version of Java. To help them, Waratek released an updated version of Waratek AppSecurity for Java at JavaOne.

This new version extends runtime application self-protection down to legacy Java applications, bringing Java 8 levels of security awareness to older projects.

Holt said Waratek “creates a virtualized runtime inside the JVM. That has the same functional effects inside the JVM as a hypervisor has on a server. We then create a container of sorts. Inside that container you can boot an application stack, including an operating system, that will be fully isolated from the physical server below.”

Other new products
Java mainstays CloudBees, Gradle, Hazelcast, Tomitribe and Vaadin all had something to show this year, alongside more generic developer tools firms like Atlassian, GitHub and IBM.

This year’s show saw some newcomers, however. The Eclipse Che Project demonstrated the workspace server and IDE combination being developed alongside Orion and the new Common Language Server Protocol, which offers syntax highlighting and other language-specific supports in a manner that can be projected out to a client IDE from a server.

Another newcomer to JavaOne was Neeve Research with its X Platform. This high-performance Java application framework combines in-memory data storage with a memory-oriented approach to application development. The company touted its extremely low latency, due to the running of applications on the same hardware as the in-memory storage system.

Split also made its JavaOne debut. The company offers a controlled release platform for developers. Before deploying code, Split users encapsulate new features with small snippets of code. This code then enables developers to push to a live server with those features turned off until desired. This makes the process of pushing code to production safer and more manageable.

Radio maker FreeWave Technologies was at JavaOne for the first time to entice developers to build applications for its devices. FreeWave specializes in rugged radio communication platforms used in things like oilrigs and other remote machinery. The company has now packed a JRE into its radio devices, allowing edge-of-network processing to take place on sensor data from IoT devices plugged into its ZumLink 900Mhz Ethernet radios.

Crafter Software demonstrated its open-source Java content-management system at JavaOne. The company touted this platform as a completely Java-backed content system that offers scalability, a simple-to-use content creation interface, and integrations with third-party applications.