“Since Java is no longer the “next big thing,” and hype-heavy headlines about it have largely disappeared from tech and mainstream publications, one might harbor the impression that the language and platform are falling by the wayside. In fact, Java has finally achieved one of the highest honors the tech industry can bestow: It is taken for granted as part of the infrastructure on which many companies depend.” Read the article at Yahoo!News by Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier.
The Future of Java
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I, for one, like java. To all those who say it is slow, I say that was once true but computers are getting faster and java has improved. I hope it stays around for a long time.
its not ~AS~ slow….
no longer slow as a slug crawling through molasses as miracles in jit technology have allowed it to be merely as slow as a baby crawling on his belly
thanks for pointing that out to us :o)
Java is the real multiplatform language. .Net could be faster, but is not usable in OSs like Mac OS X.
If you care about being able to run your programs on multiple platforms, why do you even bother mentioning .NET? MSIL exists for one reason… to allow .NET applications to run on builds of Windows for non-IA32 ISAs with performance levels similar to code natively compiled for those architectures.
You might as well be ranting about how DirectShow filters aren’t portable to other platforms…
Java wasn’t the first language targeting multiplatform applications (c, perl) and isn’t the last one two (.net) but it’s powerfull library makes it a wonder of our days.
With C/C++ you have more power, but with java you have a powerfull and well designed library, plus a simple and at the same time powerfull language. In general terms, is easier and faster to develop applications in Java than C/C++/Pascal/Basic/Eiffel… why? Java API.
What has .NET to offer? Only GUI development is simpler (not considering IBM SWT), C# is almost equivalent to Java, worst IMHO. And the library is so ogly compared to Java…
I don’t know if Microsoft.NET will dominate over Java, but surely the computing world will lost if that happens some day.
Just my two cents.
DirectShow isn’t TMK, but DirectX is in process.. but not by msft, mind you. but unlike msft, others don’t write direct x wrappers for their platform intent on forcing ms to accept their specs. Hence the relationship of .NET and XML.
Anyhow, this is really about how someone with Java skills can get a job doing Java, which is great. I’ve seen Java2. It can be fast, it’s fast inheirantly.
I would like to see Sun Microsystems develop a project system that uses solaris different, and sun os differently. It’s mostly in the GUI. I mean, when you build Java and own it, you can use that far better with openlook(they have a lic.), swingui, and not have to mess too much with motif widgets- which I never got mahogany over. You could even run the javaX server(yes, such exists), or something else.
But, unlike MS, they don’t try to force that total 100 percent solution upon you. ie, Internet Explorer, Office, Windows, and MSN.. and they do try their best to force it…
J2EE rocks for development. With ModelJ (http://modelj.sourceforge.net/), CMP beans I can develop faster and more accuratly without even being tied to a specific database.
Nowadays you can do fantastic things in short amount of time without spending your time writing SQL-code and designing databases.
http://www.jcraft.com/wiredx/index.html
http://www.jcraft.com/weirdx/index.html (this one is GPLed, and it’s fast, and it even does alpha blending :p)
tried it a while back… very, VERY interesting!
Java is in danger of becoming bloated with legacy cruft that really needs to either be removed or maybe move it all to a legacy package (preferably a seperate download).
Also i can wait for generics, i just wish i learnt about these and the pizza compiler earlier !
if (beverage.instanceof(BEER))
{
fallOver();
}
AnonaMoose – Isn’t templates possible to use in Java 1.4 ?
forget them both…..www.python.org
Java will continue to do well in the market as it’s got a few big companies (IBM, Sun, BEA, etc.) continuing to sell it into the enterprise. It’s got momentum.
The modern enterprise has been sold down the river of tunnel vision and monoculture by these companies. “Yes, Java is the answer to any development need your enterprise may have.” Uh huh. It’s turning out, on the edges, that companies are deserting Java, finding it really doesn’t work very well for applications that have to manipulate a lot of data quickly. Or run for a long time. Or run on a cheap server. Reality is creeping into Sun’s rosy Java picture.
As a programming language, on the average Java takes more lines of code to produce the same program than any other modern programming language. As we know, more lines of codes usually leads to more bugs. Which we find in Java. There are more tools for tracking down problems in Java than in any other programming language. This is true in an absolute sense as well as a relative sense. There are more performance problems and critical runtime bugs in Java than in any other modern programming language.
The benchmarks have all shown many times that Java creates large bloated and slow programs.
To think that the MONO VM is working in some cases on par with the hyped Sun HotSpot VM laughable. Microsoft passed over the little company that made HotSpot saying the technology wasn’t good enough and Sun, ever following in the footsteps of Microsoft, swooped in and bought them. All these years later and the MONO VM is ascending to challenge Sun on performance. That just makes me feed sad for Sun. Why are they so stupid?
So what does Java offer? It does set a low bar. Hordes of mediocre developers can hack code. And they can buy lots of fancy tools and create endless diagrams and system descriptions and think they are really creating that system in the diagram. It all makes for a very powerful illusion. Instead of building an excellent system using skilled developers, some large bloated pile of mediocrity comes out of the Global Java Workforce. And we wonder why IT projects fail and why so many end users hate their IT departments. Uh huh.
So I use Java continuing to hold in the market until the great behemoth coasts to a stop. And then people will wake up and see all the more effective and interesting ways to meet software development needs that have been all around them the whole time. Java is not about making programming effective, interesting or fun. It is about achieving monoculture at any cost.
After Java has stopped being the only choice in the enterprise, after companies are moving on to other things, Sun will finally release the language spec, now over ONE MILLION pages, to ANSI as an open standard. 20 years later, ANSI will be done with the Java spec and it will go on some dusty shelf somewhere, next to all the other has been languages.
Adding functionality similar to templates, more correctly known as generics to java is discussed in the paper “Adding Generics to the Java Programming Language: Participant Draft Specification” that can be downloaded from Sun. There is also a patch available that adds the suggested functionality to the 1.3 JDK. Currently it sounds like the functionality will be added for real in the 1.5 release so that will be something to look forward to.
Java is not slow because it interprets byte code.
It is however a memory hog.
And copying around much data makes things slow as well.
For some reason it became a nice language for building IDEs.
I am not exactly sure why. Building something like Eclipse or Netbeans should have been possible with Qt, a C++ crossplatform GUI toolkit, as well.
The language itself is rather boring, compared to C++.
And even more compared to Erlang or OCaml or Prolog or Lisp or..
Regards,
Marc
>forget them both…..www.python.org
I’m agree with you, Python is the way to do.
haha. Come on. And everything in Java is an Object too. Yea right.
The modern enterprise has been sold down the river of tunnel vision and monoculture by these companies. “Yes, Java is the answer to any development need your enterprise may have.” Uh huh. It’s turning out, on the edges, that companies are deserting Java, finding it really doesn’t work very well for applications that have to manipulate a lot of data quickly. Or run for a long time. Or run on a cheap server. Reality is creeping into Sun’s rosy Java picture.
I don’t think any language is the _one_ answer to any problem. Java solves a lot of problems in an “OK” fashion. It makes some easy things very easy, and some hard things easier. On the other hand, the split of primitives and objects results in some funky handling of some datatypes making something that should be simple a little harder.
I’m not sure what the crack about not running for a long time is about… I’m a happy user of OSS Java applications like Tomcat, Eclipse, and others, and they run fine for extended periods. Outside of scheduled downtimes (upgrading Tomcat to newer versions) our servers run 24/7 365 without any problems. Our middle tier for accessing the database seems to have no problems with millions of records, and seems to move fast enough for our users. YMMV.
As a programming language, on the average Java takes more lines of code to produce the same program than any other modern programming language. As we know, more lines of codes usually leads to more bugs. Which we find in Java.
Based on what? Where’s the link to this average? Cause, you know C/C++ are such unwordy languages – oh yeah and VB is awfully consise. Sure, Perl might be more consise, but damn if that code won’t look like gibberish. Python is pretty good for code size – but I don’t see many app servers using Python yet.
There are more tools for tracking down problems in Java than in any other programming language. This is true in an absolute sense as well as a relative sense. There are more performance problems and critical runtime bugs in Java than in any other modern programming language.
Sources? Proof? Oh yeah, I forgot, having a run-time debugger is for wimps. Oh, and that distributed debugger for applications whose code spans three different systems must not be all that good to have. I’d rather rely on print statements to find the problem. Maybe the fact that Java has an easy to use introspection API has something to do with the easy availability of debugging tools?
Oh, and that JUnit stuff must be bad… Of course there are some pretty serious professionals who created it – they seem to be pretty well educated.
But hey when your experience is hacking and scripts, and _speed_ is the end all be all of a project it might be hard to see the forest for the trees. Sometimes speed isn’t everything. Sometimes transactional integrity is more important. Sometimes other people being able to work with your code is more important… But hey, as long as you’re happy keeping clients in vendor lock-in cause there’s no way they could ever find someone to replace you… great!
I don’t understand why so many people think Python is some kind of catchall solution.
The language has poor structure, scoping by indentation is an aweful design. It can make for hellish code structure and readability. It’s nice that if forces you to indent your code, but it causes more problems than it fixes.
The language is constantly in a state of limbo, much like PHP. There isn’t enough stability that a company could risk staking their core codebase on it.
The language lacks robust API’s for many venues of development, especially in enterprise spaces.
Python is a good teaching language I think, like Modula 2 was before it, but just because it’s easy for a beginner to pick up and understand the concepts of doesn’t mean that if provides the basis of things needed for wide spread use in large scale software development endevours. Which require stability, reliability, maintainability, and extendibility.
I’m still amazed by the weekly posts by Eugenia about how much Java suck. It’s seems that someone here still thinks Java is applets only. Well, I agree, Java IS slow for desktop applications, but look at where Java is used. In the enterprise. And it’s doing a damn good job!
Well, I agree, Java IS slow for desktop applications, but look at where Java is used. In the enterprise. And it’s doing a damn good job!
You mean back on the servers? Please!!!
Hiding Java on a server does not make it a faster solution. I have more than a few boxes that can testify to that.
I’m sure OsNews will manage to bring about the demise of Java all by itself.
Chris: I mean desktop applications using swing. It’s slow. And it’s not about hiding Java on the server, I work as a consultant for IBM and we deliver fast (enough), scalable and portable J2EE applications to our customers daily. If Java were that bad that suggested frequently at osnews, why is it one of the biggest technologies in the middletier?
“The language is constantly in a state of limbo, much like PHP. There isn’t enough stability that a company could risk staking their core codebase on it. ”
What? I think you should do a little more reading on python.
You should contact M$ at once, i think M$ will promise you the
chief marketing officer on the phone line.
You are so the same as M$ in so many ways–cheating, dreaming, boasting.
MONO without asp.net and ado.net and many other key components of M$’s .NET is just a doll and puppet.
Did you hear that M$ wanted to apply patents for its .NET baby?
We need companies like M$ to irratate the industry to keep making progress, but we do not need M$s dominate our brain and soul.
What quality a programming langage need to be an enterprise solution ?
‘What quality a programming langage need to be an enterprise solution ? ‘
Its needs to have the quality of VB right? HAHA…VB is nothing but quality….and thats an enterprise solution 🙂
go python go
http://www.python.org
C++, Java, ObjC and even C#
We currently use a vanilla C platform, but we probably shouldn’t in our business. We’d be much better served by a more OO language, but our original developers built the core system and all they knew was C because they were both EE’s.
These are all very robust languages which have strict standards for structure and implementation. They can all be used to develop complex software models in an organized and maintainable way.
Python is difficult to integrate into large systems because of some of it’s relaxed methods for implementing OO functionalities. There are too many ways to use the language to get around aspects of OO design that other languages strictly enforce.
Python is a good learning language, it is an excellent post deployment extension languagel, such as making your application externally scriptable or modifiable through Python wrappers.
It is not a good infrastructure language.
big words from a small man.
go python go
http://www.python.org
I found SWT hell to use, please please point out the easy way of using this horrific lib!
What?
@Nathan
I’m no Python expert or zealot, but to say it is not an “enterprise solution” perhaps was not the best way to put it. The facts show otherwise:
From a recent Python article..
“..organizations such as BEA Systems Inc., IBM, Google Technology Inc., Yahoo Inc., Disney, Red Hat Inc., and even Industrial Light & Magic all use it.”
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/030301/604e_business1_1.shtml
Some more Python users….
http://www.python.org/psa/Users.html
Perhaps it wasn’t the answer for your organization, but it is for many. However, I agree with you that it is not a catch all solution.
They don’t use it as an infrastructure language. They all use it as an accessory language.
They’re not building the foundations of their software products and services on Python, they’re using Python to talk to and manipulate their foundation software and services.
“They don’t use it as an infrastructure language. They all use it as an accessory language. ”
See now your changing what you first said….first its not an enterprise language….now its not an infrastructure language….dude…think before you type….or at least read what you write before you post….you make yourself like like a friggin idiot.
“…dude…think before you type….or at least read what you write before you post….you make yourself like like a friggin idiot. ”
Pot, meet Kettle.
yeah…..ass meet dick…..homo