So, Oracle killed java.net

Well, not yet…but they announced to shutdown java.net and kenai by May 2017. I have been interviewed about this for an ADTmag article The ‘Sunsetting’ of Kenai and java.net by John K. Waters.

As Oracle provided little information to what will happen to critical projects that are already hosted on java.net, most of what was written in the article is still valid. Therefore I’m reposting my comments here again.

There have been discussions over several years about the future of java.net and kenai.com, as there was very little improvement in both of them to keep up with modern trends. Therefore it made sense to reconsider what role they are playing in the Java ecosystem. However, the way Oracle announced the plan to shut them down makes many members of the community wonder whether it was carefully planned or just a desire to cut costs and shut down projects they cannot monetize. The latter is more likely, as even many people from Oracle, who stand behind existing projects hosted onjava.net, don’t yet have a plan how to migrate their project to somewhere else.

There are many valuable resources on both java.net and kenai.com, including project sources and documentation, forums, blogs, and other sorts of information like JUG profiles and documents. The announcement poses high risk that certain amount of that information will be lost after the shut down of both sites. We can remember the losses from recent history, when all sun.com sites were migrated under oracle domains, but not all links are properly redirected to date. People would say the internet has very good memory, but it can also forget badly when a site like java.net goes down completely.
As a member of the Java and Java EE community, I would appreciate if Oracle provided at least a simple replacement for both sites, which would be a unified portal for all Java community members and opensource projects, while relying on other common services like GitHub for the necessary infrastructure. Something likeplugins.netbeans.org does for Netbeans community, or www.codeplex.com does for Microsoft opensource community. The effort is ongoing with community.oracle.com, so hopefully soon enough this new Oracle community page will be able to provide all what is necessary to bring the community together.

The important fact to point out here is that java.net has been a standard place to host all the official resources for most Java EE JSRs, including project sites, history of public communication on mailing lists, tracked issues, sources of the reference implementations. If java.net was shut down right now, it would practically mean death to Java EE, or in better case a hibernation lasting for many months.This is the reason why I joined Java EE Guardians, who intend to keep reminding this fact to the Oracle, the JCP board and JSR specification leads and actively offer our cooperation in finding a new home for all JSRs and related projects. It has to be ensured that no valuable resources are lost and that the new tools and hosting is even more appropriate than current solutions. In the end, if that is accomplished, we can all benefit from making the Java EE process more transparent and accessible to even wider community.