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Comment by dlanouette | Hacker News Reader

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dlanouette

Java on mobile was (virtually) dead before Android. Now it's thriving and relevant again.

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It was thriving in Europe, on flaghship Nokia and Sony-Ericson devices.

SavaJe OS was going to be the next generation when Android came into the scene.

Android first architecture diagrams look quite similar to the initial SavaJe OS presentations.

SavaJe went bankrupt two years before Android was released.

And who bought their assets? Sun.

After Android was released. And after the IP assets had been laying around on the market more than two years.

Sun buying SavaJe was pretty clearly a response to Android, so it's pretty disingenuous to say that Android killed SavaJe.

Apparently we live in different timelines:

1999 - SavaJe is founded

2006 - Jasper S20 with SavaJe OS gets presented at Java ONE

2006 - End of the year, SavaJe fails to gain another round of investment, in spite of the successful reception at Java ONE

2007 - April, Sun public announcement to buy SavaJe assets

2007 - November, Open Handset Alliance is created

2008 - November, HTC Dream gets released as the very first Android device. The initial architecture diagrams have a certain resemblance with SavaJe ones.

The OS that came to be Android started in 2003, was initially based in JavaScript, had lots of time to inspire on Java stacks after they pivoted to Java and were eventually bought by Google.

Only after SavaJe was no longer around, it became public what Google was up to regarding their mobile OS strategy.

Why are you comparing the date of SavaJe's being acquired, with the date of Android being actually released or gaining third party external hardware partners? Apples and apples would be Google's acquisition of Android in 2005 vs. Sun's acquisition of SavaJe's in 2007. And even then, Google acquired the actual devs too, whereas Sun only acquired the code and IP.

And Android is way more a rip off of Palm than SavaJe. All of the interesting things it does (the intent system, the capability based IPC, the battery friendly process lifecycle model, etc.) clearly descend from Palm (which isn't a surprise given that's where Dianne Hackborn cut her teeth).

J2ME was king on mobile devices in Europe (at least). Moreover, SUN had licencing fees from J2ME and if I remember correctly, you could not use Java on mobile devices without paying fee to SUN. So, it was their source of income and Google abused that. Just check interview (many times referenced here in comments) with James Gosling to see what the feelins on SUN side were. At that point, they were already underdogs compared to Google. This is all about greedy Google business behaviour and I think with Oracle they just got nice sparing partner to play legal war games with. SUN was too nice for them.

Java on mobile was (virtually) dead before Android. Now it's thriving and relevant again.

Perhaps, but is that a good thing if you're Oracle? Especially considering the fact that it's Google Java that's thriving and not Oracle Java.

It seems to me that it's a good thing for Oracle. Oracle/Sun was never going to make any headway in the mobile space. It just wasn't going to happen. So, it wasn't a loss to them, because they had already lost that market.

But, with Android, Java got a boost that bled over to the server, and to a lesser extent, the desktop. It can be argued what the size of that boost was, and if it had any real impact (I would argue that it was not significant), but it was still a boost that they never would have had.

Anyway, that's the opinion of some random guy on the internet.

Java was already king of the enterprise server long before Android happened.

Around 2006, many companies were moving their server stacks from C++, considered old and stagnated, into Java application servers.

I took part in several such projects.

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