So what does this mean? A commercially very successful company bought a very inventive (yet not commercially successful) company.  Just look at the list of acquired companies. So Oracle bought a company with 3 key products: Sun hardware & OS, Java and MySQL. The hardware business was suffering from the biggest losses. Premium hardware with excellent software and support, but expensive and outran by cheap X86 hardware + Linux. Still, if you need one machine to serve your big and battered database, a Sun Solaris box running Oracle (!) is your best bet. MySQL caused the biggest concern for the EC to deeply investigate the merger. Their fear was that Oracle would be come a too big player on the database market. I don’t know how, but somehow the EC now thinks this is not a major concern so that their approved of the merger. I am still concerned, especially after the original creator of the open source database wrote that the world should object. However, MySQL is still open source and has been for some while, so buying the company that bought the company that offers support (and yes does a lot of development) should not hinder the further development from MySQL too much.

So what about Java? Ha, this is a matter that is important to me. As everybody else, I think that Java was the one reason for Oracle to buy Sun. Why? Because apart from its database all other products are running Java, and Java is used a lot by its existing clients. And controlling Java, well… Fortunately a lot of Java parts are already open source, mainly through the Java Community Process. But, yes, I agree with Douglas Allen’s post on TheServerSide , Oracle has always been about big businesses and this will become true for Java. Arrived, big businesses, as banks, telco’s, 10 billion + companies that have a lot of politics and can shell out hundreds of thousands or euros to pay licenses and consultants.

So what about the smaller more agile new web 2.0 startups that do not need ESB, 2PC, JTA, or EJB?  Yes, Java (J2ee or JEE to be more precise) is used in internet companies like Linkedin.com, Facebook’s Cassandra, Amazon, Google’s Ajax framework GWT that is used for Gmail,  Ebuddy but a lot of new companies are using script languages like PHP , Python or Ruby on Rails. I think this is partly because of perception, partly because of the promise of productivity. Yes, Java has a lot of things you need to learn (strong typing, packages, runtimes) but for bigger projects this helps you to organize things. So yes, I hope the open source part of Java will become stronger, and products like Spring, Tomcat, Jetty, ActiveMQ, Eclipse will form a separate open source ecosystem besides Oracle’s business oriented Java family.

Ha, I figured I should start this blog with a first post about installing Wordpress (version 2.3.3) on a blank Apache/MySQL machine with CentOS as operating system. I have installed Wordpress earlier, but that was with Fantastico. This is a script library that big hosting companies use to offer an easy installation to end users that do not have adminstrative rights on their machine. As I am now the proud owner of a Xen VPS I have my own CentOS machine to manage, including a clean Apache and MySQL. Previous installations were a piece of cake, and I didn’t think this would be otherwise. So there I went, trying to beat previous records. Alas, some things had to tweak before everything was up and running:

1. Getting different virtual hosts up and running.
   As the web sites www.d17.nl, www.d-17.com and blog.d-17.com are running on the same machine with the same ip-address, I wanted to use name based virtual hosting to distinguish between the sites. So I configured my virtual hosts, but nothing happened:(. Turned out that I had to enable it first with the NameVirtualHost directive, which is default turned off. So I added this line to my httpd.conf:

   NameVirtualHost *:80

   which says that name based virtual hosting is active for every ip-address on the machine, but only for connections on port 80.

2. Enabling url rewriting for SEO-friendly URLs.
   So now my homepage worked, admin part also, but clicking through to a post page I got an error. I knew I had SEO-friendly URL’s turned on, and was expecting this to be hampered by a not functional mod_rewrite. I had already put the .htacces file in the root of my blog, so apparently it wasn’t processed. So again to httpd.conf, to add this line:

   AllowOverride All

   and not in the general section, but within the Directory element within the virtualhost config section.

3. Making MySQL behave.
   I was stubborn and didn’t want to follow the 5 minute installation manual. Turned out I misconfigured the rights of the db user related to from what hosts it was allowed to login. So you should just follow the manual precisely:)

Tada, hello word!