Current Status of Oracle's Project Avatar

February 12, 2015

Tags: #nodejs #jvm #avatar #oracle #javascript

In my last blog post about the current status of Avatar (if you haven’t read it yet, do it now), I complained once more about Oracle’s communication strategy, or non-strategy. This time, I was loud enough! Oracle did hear me!

They sent me an email and asked for a phone call - which I accepted very gladly!
So, one week ago I talked to John Clingan (Principal Product Manager Java EE & Glassfish Server) and Mike Lehmann (Vice President Product Management Application Server Infrastructure / Cloud Application Foundation) and asked for the current status and future plans of Project Avatar and Avatar.js.

Today, John finally published this article about “Project Avatar Update” in the Aquarium Blog, approximately the same statements, which I got in the phone call.

tl;dr: For now, the development of Avatar is on hold

For me, this decision of Oracle is very disappointing and sad. I would’ve loved to hear/read, that the Avatar development will continue. I’m in doubt that the development will be restarted sometime.

Focussing on a native Node.js Oracle DB client and a Node.js process in the Oracle Cloud are noteworthy, but it’s not approximately the same as running Node.js applications on the JVM, which focusses more on integration and re-usablity topics (application/library integration as also operations/monitoring).

Everyone, who’s still interessted in running Node.js apps on the JVM, I can really recommend Nodyn from Red Hat. Also still in development, but in heavy development. I think (hope!), Nodyn will have better future than Avatar has/had…

I’d appreciate any comment on this topic, weather here or on twitter (@dasniko). What do you think about Oracle’s decision?

« New article about Nodyn in german Java Magazin Developer Interview by Markus Eisele (Red Hat) »