Given the recent activities it is my feeling that AD has been slowing repositioning itself to be a complete toolkit that is 100% Java and will run inside Oracle itself. I do not think this is a bad move for them but I think it does have some implications for OpenACS.
Considering the performance penalities incurred in such an
architectural design I believe they will start to add more and more
Oracle-isms. I see it very likely that if they complete this task they would be an attractive takeover target for Oracle.
ACS 5 will be 100% Java, but it will not be running inside of Oracle. ACS 5 will be, if anything, less dependent on Oracle than any previous version of ACS was. Adding more Oracle-isms is not an effective way to improve performance. Yes, it can make things faster for single-user cases, but doing more work inside of Oracle makes it harder to scale to handle large numbers of simultaneous users, because it increases contention for the shared resources (CPU, memory, disk) on the Oracle machine. The less work you do inside Oracle, the greater the benefit you can get by adding more front-end servers.
Speaking as an engineer who works at AD: I have seen no internal evidence that our move to Java is designed to make us an "attractive takeover target for Oracle". It was not strictly a business or marketing decision. Management and marketing did not hand this decision down to engineering with no input from us. In reality, much of the initiative for the move away from TCL came from within engineering, and many of the engineers here (including myself) are happy to see it happening - TCL gets pretty painful pretty quickly when you start trying to use it for something that requires more complex processing than bboard. I won't try to pretend that Java's marketability is just a happy coincidence and played no role in the decision, but it played a much smaller role than many people on the bboards here and at AD.com seem to think.
