What will happen with Java with Oracle buying Sun? Do I regret choosing Java to rewrite Suneido?
Oracle buying Sun does make me a little nervous but I don't think Java is going to go away, there is too much of it out there.
I don't regret choosing Java to rewrite Suneido. There aren't a lot of mainstream alternatives - .Net would be a possibility, with Mono on Linux. I think .Net is a good platform, but I like being tied to Microsoft even less than I like being tied to Oracle. And I think Java is less tied to Oracle than .Net is tied to Microsoft.
There are, of course, other alternatives like LLVM or Parrot, but they don't have the same kind of support behind them.
I've heard persuasive arguments (albeit mostly from Oracle) that it is to Oracle's benefit to keep Java alive and "open" since much of Oracle's software is written in Java. They might try to charge for stuff but probably at the enterprise end, which doesn't bother me too much.
I do wish Java moved a little faster. Java 7 is taking forever, and now a lot of it has been postponed to Java 8. Meanwhile, Microsoft has moved surprizingly quickly with advancing .Net. On the positive side, the new features in Java 7 for dynamic languages (JSR 292) will be very nice. And I do want stability, so I can't complain too much.
I don't think the Oracle buyout has any effect on jSuneido in the short term. I'm using Java 6 which is readily available.
What platform are you using to develop jSuneido?
I do most of my development on Mac OS X using Eclipse. I run the Windows cSuneido client using Parallels. I'm pretty happy with this. The only minor hassle was that Apple was really slow to release new versions of Java. And Sun/Oracle don't directly release OS X versions. You could get new OS X versions of Java from other places but it was an extra hassle. Now Apple has announced that they won't be distributing Java any more. This isn't a big deal - Microsoft doesn't distribute Java either. It would be nice if Oracle would add OS X as one of their supported platforms. (Not just on Open JDK.)
But this is only the development environment. In terms of deploying the jSuneido server I expect it will be mostly Windows and Linux. There aren't many people using OS X for servers. And Apple just discontinued their rack mount server.
I also do some development on my Windows machine at work. There are slight differences, but mostly I can use the identical Eclipse setup.
I haven't done any testing on Linux. I would hope it would be fine but there could be minor issues. If we were only working on Windows then there might be more, but Linux shouldn't be too different from OS X.
We are getting close to switching our in-house accounting/crm system over to jSuneido. This will be a good test since we have about 40 users. Currently we have a Windows server to run this system and a Linux server for other things. Once we are running on jSuneido we are hoping to get rid of the Windows server and just use the Linux one. So Linux support is definitely coming.
Where can I get a copy of jSuneido?
Currently, the only way to get it is as source code from Mercurial on SourceForge:
http://suneido.hg.sourceforge.net:8000/hgroot/suneido/jsuneido
I haven't started posting pre-built jar file releases yet, but probably soon. If anyone is interested in getting a copy to experiment with, just let me know and I can send you one.
What about a GUI for jSuneido?
Currently, jSuneido does not have any GUI. cSuneido's GUI is Windows based so it's not portable.
In the long run it would be nice to add a GUI to jSuneido. Then, eventually, I could stop supporting cSuneido. Maintaining two parallel versions is a lot of extra work.
The conventional Java approaches would be Swing or SWT.
Another idea would be to try to use the newer GUI system from Java FX, but there's not much support for using it outside of FX yet.
Another possibility would be to switch to a web based GUI, even for local use. That's an intriguing idea that would be fun to investigate. The downside is that instead of just Suneido code, you'd have HTML and CSS and JavaScript and AJAX. Not exactly the self-contained model that Suneido has had up till now.
The bigger issue for us is that we have a lot of code based on the old GUI system. So a priority for us would be to minimize the porting effort.
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