Tags: Java
Frans Thamura asks an interesting question...
What do you think of OpenJDK 10 years from Now? .. gosh. Okay, we first have to ignore the wags cluck-clucking over Sun's stock price and issuing warnings of doom. But hey it's a great question, what will be the significance of the OpenJDK 10 yrs from now?
Clearly the OpenJDK could reach "everywhere" .. all along this process of opening the OpenJDK I've been confident that it could have a significance similar to GCC where GCC provides compiler coverage for essentially every CPU and operating system. I'm a little surprised that Frans's vision is only on desktop & server environments as there is growing capabilities for the small devices to be able to run OS & graphics capabilities that have formerly been only for desktop or laptop computers.
e.g. I just bought a Chumby and it's an amazing peek into the future of small computerized gadgets. It's a small embedded Linux computer with a touch sensitive screen and wifi support allowing you to have an Internet-aware gadget displaying highly graphical applications in more places than before. The Chumby GUI is programmed in Flash but an equivalent device could be made which is programmed in JavaFX (whenever we finish JavaFX).
The OS's of interest need not be limited to Linux. There are other OS's of interest some which are more attuned to embedded devices. Also the
JNODE project shows the possibility of an embedded device using Java as the OS.
Another idea would be that a wide range of languages would have great support on the OpenJDK JVM. Of course the Java platform has long been able to run lots of languages but with some focused effort in the multi-language VM project the story could be much better.
10 years is a long time in Internet years and it's quite conceivably possible we'll reach ubiquity by then. It's not guaranteed, of course, that it will happen. I'm confident it's possible.
Source:
weblogs.java.net
