Now that Java has a fully open sourced implementation in RedHat's IcedTea, Neil McAllister questions whether an open Java even matters: "Even as Java has stretched outward to embrace more concepts and technologies - adding APIs and language features as it goes - newer, more lightweight tools have appeared that do most of what Java aims to do. And they often do it better."
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Member since:
2006-12-07
There are many extension of Python that need to be compiled from C code and linked with source code of other libraries and extensions. Imagine that you need to deploy an application on server at customers premises running Windows server. There is no C compiler, and no one would let you install one on production machine, which is quite sane. You have no control over dynamic libraries resident on the machine and they will not let you add and remove existing, which is very sane, too.
Imagine that you need to access LDAP from Python application, and LDAP server is no OpenLDAP. Or you have to connect to a database which is not MySQL or Postgres.
The strength of Java is that it is rather isolated from the rest of the machine and almost all extensions are written in Java. One can add additional driver or library by simply dropping a file in a particular directory. Developer can deploy an application without interfering with other functions of the host machine.
DG