News

New Java Developer Capabilities in the Oracle Cloud Platform

• By John K. Waters
• June 24, 2015

Oracle Corp. unveiled more than 24 new cloud-based services during a press conference Monday, including analytics for data visualization, content and collaboration services, and compute and storage cloud services. Among those services are some new capabilities for Java developers, as well as new support for related languages and frameworks.

"We proudly inherited Java when we acquired Sun," Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison said, "and Java is a very important technology to us. It's the most popular programming language in the world, but it's not the only programming language in the world.... Our intention is to support all of the popular programming languages in the Oracle cloud."

Oracle announced three new services aimed at developers: Java SE, JRuby and Node Cloud Services; Mobile Cloud Service; and Application Builder Cloud Service.

The new Java SE, JRuby and Node Cloud Services offering provides Java developers not writing Java EE applications (they're writing POJOs) with a Linux-based containerized virtual machine (VM) in the cloud. "You can create a Docker image of your application on premise and push that into the VM in the cloud using the standard Docker tools and registry we provide," explained Oracle president Thomas Kurian.

The service includes Oracle's Java SE Advanced for performance tuning and optimization, allows developers to deploy any Java 8 application in the cloud (as well as Java 6 and 7 apps), and supports any standard IDE.

But, as its name spells out, this service is not just for Java jocks. "If you are running Ruby applications and you want the scalability of a very high performance, but also scale out VM, you can run it on the Java system," Kurian said. "We support JRuby, but you can use any language that runs on the Java VM, even functional languages." And fans of Node.js, the popular open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime project, are also supported by this service. Java SE users have access to thousands of Node libraries on the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle's Mobile Cloud Service is a mobile-back-end-as-a-service (MBaaS) that provides developers with a set of tools for building Android and iOS apps that run entirely in the cloud. Developers use a browser and their preferred language to build a UI and set up an API for data exchange. It also comes with a software development kit (SDK) for app instrumentation.

"[The Mobile Cloud Service] allows you build apps that can run on any platform -- phones, tablets, iOS, Android, Windows -- and then on the back-end, it allows you to expose services to have an API catalog and then publish it to mobile devices," Kurian said. "This gives you a centralized point of enforcement of security, authentication, authorization, and analytics."

Finally, Oracle's new Application Builder Cloud Service was designed for the so-called business developer who wants to create Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) extensions without a lot of coding. Based on JavaScript and REST, this extremely lightweight service comes with a drag-and-drop UI, and it allows users to compose services and data from any RESTful back-end or a database back-end and build UIs that use a JavaScript framework in the browser.

"Let's say you're a sales consultant using our CRM application in the cloud," Kurian said, "and you want to extend the capabilities of the application -- say you want to build a partner portal you can access in the cloud. And you want to build a custom set of screens that take REST services from the application and make them accessible to partners who are accessing the CRM. This is the service you would use."