Not done yet: Oracle to ship revised Java fix on February 19

Can it get any worse?

What's worse than not fixing critical flaws in your environment? Making people believe that you did, only to follow up with the news that you weren't fully done yet. These are the kind of jokes which aren't very well received within the Enterprise (commonly speaking) because usually implementing patches and updates takes quite a bit of preparation to make sure all works as expected.

So I wouldn't be surprised one bit if certain companies were quite on schedule with updating, only to discover that they can now start all over.

Oracle is playing a dangerous game IMO. Java has its strengths, sure, but one of those used to be its reputation of being a safe platform. Then what's left, ease of programming? Even that remains to be seen; although there have been quite some developments on the SE fronts, EE often remains as obscure as ever. Take for example a trivial issue of uploading a file; before EE6 ('servlet 3.0') this wasn't quite possible without the help of external libraries. It was doable without, but ugh... It sure wasn't easy.

This has changed with EE6 (released around 2010 IIRC), but can still be somewhat confusing, check this tutorial example (link to Oracle's Java EE6 tutorial). In short you define an input form, setup an annotation with extra information, write your code to setup an InputStream, FileOutputStream, obviously catch exceptions and you basically program most of it yourself though by far as difficult as it used to be.

Even so; it gets awkward I think when you find out that one of the competitors basically provides a "2 lines of code" kind of solution. Uploading a file in ASP for example is basically using an <asp:FileUpload> part which allows the user to specify the file to upload, then all you need is using its SaveAs method, as can be seen in this example (link to MSDN page with an ASP Fileupload example).

When looking at its API documentation (MSDN link) you'll notice it has been around since .NET 2.0. Which was released around 2005 (according to Wikipedia).

Now, not insinuating that ASP is so great here, though I think it sure has some key strengths, but its feature set is quite rich when compared to Java's Servlet specifications. File upload is one example, how about JaaS for user authentication ?

If Oracle keeps ticking people off with stunts like this then I don't think its all that unlikely that companies may consider a change. It seems that you certainly don't have to rewrite your entire codebase since many aspects are provided out of the box. This example addresses ASP but I'm pretty sure there are more to be found.