An application development stack from Oracle and new Pixels and other hardware from Google.

Oracle’s Application Dev Stack

Oracle held an event at which they announced a number of things. Among them that they now support OpenJDK for their new Java 9¹, an open source Serverless solution, and more. The most interesting one for me though is their new application development stack.

This new stack is container based and contains CI/CD, a container registry, and a managed Kubernetes cluster. This is interesting from a couple aspects. First, that Oracle’s cloud has joined other cloud providers with a managed Kubernetes solution. Which is always good to see².

But secondly as it is the central CI/CD part of the stack, it shows the direction they’re taking Wercker after its acquisition. It looks like for now it’s still possible to use it separately, but after the event their branding fully changed over and it became truly an Oracle product. The new development stack is also pushed through Wercker, and if you log in to an existing Wercker account you’re asked if you want to join the beta³. It’s possible they’re trying to use this as an outlet that’s more friendly to non-Oracle developers to pull them in, but I’m still unconvinced Wercker will stick around as a separate project in the long run. Oracle seems to be saying the right things, but I need to see a lot more action to back that up before I’ll buy into it.

Pixels and Clips

Google announced their new line of Pixel hardware. The biggest thing was likely the new phone, and it looks like it’s again the best Android phone on the market. That said, I found the other products more interesting.

The Pixel Buds seem to take a lot of lessons from the AirPods, especially around charging and pairing, but with a focus on Google’s strength using a better AI. I like the ability to use it for translation on the fly. Even if it’s not perfect, it will be better than nothing. These do have a cord between the buds though, which you might consider a positive or negative thing⁴.

Pixelbook is the new Chromebook/tablet hybrid. To me this seems like an iPad Pro⁵ without a detachable keyboard but an Intel chipset. It comes with an optional pen and anything you can run on it is limited to coming from Google Play.

Finally there is Google Clips, which looks like a security camera but is intended for automatically taking short videos, clips if you will, of family moments instead. This comes with the usual caveat of privacy as it uploads everything, but allows you to view moments that might otherwise be lost. The machine learning part of this is interesting too as the camera learns to focus on people that it deems important, improving what it takes clips off.