J2EE on the Cloud: 80 pound gorilla floating on the air

Many times when we are discussing about cloud application development we talk about programming languages and frameworks different from a traditional and stabilished environment like Java and J2EE: Ruby on Rails, PHP, and the like.

So, how Java and J2EE fit into this new picture?

In fact, as you see the evolution of the EJB spec from a XML centered configuration to the annotated world on the more technical side, and more important: from a SUNs committe centered mindset to a more open development and community driven mindset.

This new JSR mindset where both eyes are very open to newer and popular trends can be seen on the influence that Hibernate took on the last EJB 3 spec.

Why java can play a role on the Cloud. Well, for the same reasons it had an important role on the emergence of the Internet. It is networked, multi threaded and more important, it is evolving from its previous mistakes due to a vibrant developer community.

The risk to this is the language become hostage of Oracle and IBM.

The key to the future is how this comunity will interact with the couple Oracle and IBM and what will grow from this.

Let´s see the Next Steps.

My Cloud Intro

Cloud Computing has been one of the hottest trends in IT to a point that we can already see mentions to it on mass media ads.

It can be seen as a consequence of both technical advances and newer problems that have risen from the so-called bigger trend Web 2.0.

As a trend, it is not alone, it is entangled with other trends like Virtualization, which attacks directly some IT management problems when you are dealing with large scale installations; and NOSQL (Not Only SQL) which tries to solve some of the programmers problems that rise from the kind of application that run on this kind of environment.

On the other side, Cloud Computing can be criticized as a relabel of the now-seems-dead Grid Computing trend, which some years ago was represented by a large number of product anouncements, an little real market significance. I do not think so, as Grid was mainly driven by major IT solutions providers like Oracle, but on the opposite Cloud has been driven, first by the needs of huge applications, like Google, Amazon and more recently by huge social sites like Facebook and Digg.

As we can see from this wider picture quickly presented above there are a lot of hot topics to address from different perspectives: IT administration, web 2.0 programmer and so on. And this is the idea of this blog. Let´s see where we can go.