The "Return" of Java Discussed 558
An anonymous reader writes "Following on from the marvelous recent James Gosling interview highlighted in Slashdot last week, it would seem that a renewed momentum is building up for his cross-platform creation, if this editorial is anything to go by. It's called 'Java is Back!' But did it ever go anywhere?"
There has been some good alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Mono
Cocoa# and Gtk# (recentely kn
Java is slow, obeist, and heavy.
Return of Java (Score:5, Insightful)
It's strange how so many people say "Java is dying" or now that it patently isn't, they're saying "Java's back". If you go to any of the recruitment websites in the UK, the most popular requirement is Java Enterprise experience, hardly the mark of a development system that's been in decline ... The only explanations for this misrepresentation of Java that I encounter on sites like Slashdot and Linux Today is the following:
Discuss ...
Request for interview (Score:5, Insightful)
Do a user driven (10 questions, you know) with James Gosling. Java/Sun takes a lot of flak these days, it would be genuinely interesting to get Gosling respond to some good questions.
Re:There has been some good alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
But how many companies do you see requiruing wxWidgets experience? Not to knock it as a cross platform development toolkit, but rightly or wrongly it's overlooked by virtually every company I've ever worked at. The exception is my current employer, where it was evaluate along with Qt and Java as a means to write cross platform GUIs. Java won, as C++ proved far too troublesome on a previous project.
.NET is actually a back handed compliment to Java. Java was so good that MicroSoft had to clone it. With Mono now at version 1.0, then perhaps C# is in a position to threaten Javas cross platform crown, although perhaps not without Windows Forms support.
Move along, nothing to see here.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this was a 100% fluff article. The foundation for the article was based entirely on the assertion that a Google for "Java" brought back far fewer hits than "NET": well no shit Sherlock- perhaps if you'd tried ".NET" instead?
The major problem Java has is EJBs: everyone in Java-land seems to think that their problem requires solving using this pile of crap. A web application with persistence- ooh we'd better use EJBs then!
A secondary issue for Java is the barrier to entry is extremely high: sure you can learn the language quickly but it's Java's libraries that add the real value. And there are an awful lot of them. I've been using Java for 10 years (yeah I developed using the AWT and cursed it every day: if it hadn't been for the AWT being so awful I'd never have thought Swing was any good). Anyway, I've been using Java for 10 years and I would hate to have to learn it from scratch today.
Re:Return of Java (Score:5, Insightful)
- despite entry level PCs now having specs along the lines of 2.5GHz processor and 256MB of RAM, lots of people on such sites are obssessed with perceived bloat
- lots of (but by no means all) people dissing Java are actually sysadmins, rather than programmers, and do all of the coding that they do do in perl, shell script, and similar
It always amuses me when I read "Java is teh suck because it's so slow and bloated!" comments. I've been doing server-side Java development for a little over 4 years now, and we've never had a performance problem. I use a number of client-side Java apps everyday, too, and they're perfectly responsive and usable. Sure, the same thing written in C or C++ probably would be faster - but when you literally can't tell the difference, who cares? A modern PC spends almost all its time waiting on user input or IO bound anyway.False arguments of past not valid (Score:2, Insightful)
when in fact Java uses allot of native code that is actually compiled c code. Its often very fast.
Source critique (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the first things I was taught in college, was to be critic of the sources I based research on.
In the world of WWW, it seems that each and every article and blog entry can be used as reliable fact. "He wrote it, it must be true". If some nerd posts that language X is the best, and those who use it are really really smart (case in point Paul Graham/Pythong) - that really doesn't make it come true. Same goes for Java "dead or alive" etc. etc. (Naturally, we all know that BSD is in fact dying - this is the exception).
Re:There has been some good alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
When Java first came out, a large number of 'web hackers' and inexperienced programmers flocked to the language and produced applications that were often very weak. The easy access to such a flexible toolkit encouraged first time coders to undertake projects beyond their skills. Even experienced teams of developers found it took a while to get to grips with the issues involved in the new environment. The result was the inevitable disillusionment following the hype. Expect C# to go through a similar slump as people realise it doesn't solve all your problems.
However, Sun have done a stunning job in evolving Java, and developers who have taken the time to understand it have been producing impressive software for some time now. The latest version is powerful, fast and addresses an enormous range of requirements that make developing software very much more efficient.
There will be a lot more about Java in the news this year. Tools are being developed for everything from screensavers to MMORPGs, so why not take a second look before rehashing old predjudices?
Re:Return of Java (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of the people who keep saying that Java is dying say it because they wish it was true.
And of course, if you keep repeating a lie often enough, the sheep begin to believe it. Just like on CNN, turn it on and watch a "reporter" frown in mock gravitas and ask things like "A lot of people are saying that the Kerry campaign is floundering and the Democrats are beginning to feel desperate, we ask the experts 'can anything be done, or is it already too late?'"
No one had said any of those things, but since CNN keeps saying that people say it, it becomes truth...
Re:Return of Java (Score:1, Insightful)
But there will always be a turf war. Everywhere I go it's the same thing: Java vs. Perl, Java vs. PHP, Java vs. Python, Java vs. C#... yet nobody seems the realise that you should select your language after understanding your requirements first. All of these languages have a place and time. Java is already very successful in the area of business automation applications, and more recently gained industry acceptance for embedded systems (Java phones). It is regaining ground again where desktop applications are concerned.
Trust me that this technology is very much alive. The improvements keep on coming, both in terms of speed and memory usage.
Keyword being: Enterprise (Score:3, Insightful)
As applets go, for example, nowadays the whole program-inna-browser market is owned by Flash, followed by ActiveX. And for good reasons.
Starting with the fact that Java 1.0 was indeed a slow piece of crap for anything but the most trivial applets. Try displaying a complex table without a JIT, and you were talking about response times you could measure with a stopwatch, not with System.currentTimeMillis().
The initial lack of support for packing everything in a jar didn't help that cause either. Downloading 50 classes as separate files isn't particularly fast. And that's a very small project.
And for all the multi-platform hype, wasn't particularly portable either. If you tried running even a trivial AWT applet on different platforms, you wouldn't even get the same events. Or for something which required you to give a size in pixels on the web site, you wouldn't even get the same font sizes.
And by the time it caught up... meh. Flash is _still_ the better choice.
Not the least because of download size. Sun now includes all the crap they could think of as standard libraries. Do I need an XML parser to make a simple game applet? Not really, but Sun wants my users to download that crap anyway.
(No, it's not a made up problem. I've had modem users tell me literally "whoa, I'm on dialup. Is there some smaller version I can download?")
That's just a small slice of the many ways in which Sun started it on the wrong foot.
Java is not back. (Score:2, Insightful)
Java language has stagnated in about 1999 with the release of J2SE 1.2 (dubbed Java 2); new J2SE 1.5 (Java 5) is just a cosmetic change of language (yes, I consider current implementation of generics/annotations to be 'cosmetic').
It's quite OK to be conservative, but you can't conquer the world of IT being conservative. Java's position on server-side is still pretty firm, but desktop apps in Java (apart from Java IDEs) are non-existant.
And Microsoft's position on server-side is strengthening. So Microsoft will prevail if nothing changes in the recent future
It went to million servers and clients (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider, that java is not only the language itself, but also the whole environment!
And thats the real big difference to mono. Java may run on any Computer since 92' till 2050, without need to take care of what Microsoft will change in 2 years.
Re:Return of Java (Score:3, Insightful)
To generalise, a main functions of an online system needs to be optimised. But things like offline processing often doesn't. Higher priorities are maintainable and reliable code.
And what you say is right about IO. When I used to work on mainframes, our senior tech guy used to tell us to not worry about the code speed except for IO. PCs are heading that way.
This writer is into amateurish journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Java can be a coffee or an island in the Indonesia. Net is a device to ensnare animals and is a verb as well.
And he cites a blog item from a Sun executive as proof that Java is back? Please. The article is nonsensical.
Re:like a turtle (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is a master at switching enough labels to "keep things interesting". New bells and whistles to hold your attention. (I'm a sucker for a pretty interface) Kind of makes it seem like Java isn't moving at all. Java never left and it's not going to "die". It is a young language that has survived and grown on its own merits and not through billions in marketing hype and R&D and despite it's creaters over protectiveness. It's just getting started.
Either the tool you're using allows you to get the job done or it doesn't. Either the tool improves over time to make your job easier or it doesn't. If you want to see Java thrive, use it.
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything is easy when you approach it from the point of view that it doesn't actually have to work.
There are many versions of the Java environment, from different vendors, all with subtly different behaviors and ways of integrating into the environment. Not to mention that the user may be running other Java applications which depend on a particular version of the Java environment, which further complicates matters. This makes it a pain if you want to deliver an application to the user with minimal hassle.
Or, you can just mandate that the user run such-and-such version of the Java enviroment on such-and-such platform, but then you lose a large part of the write-once, run-everywhere appeal.
I run Java on very low spec embedded PC's, and it's no slouch there. Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.
Java's "slowness" has at least three components: startup time, garbage collection delays, and the huge footprint which triggers swap activity.
For server applications, none of these matter much. For interactive client applications, these factors conspire to make Java apps look very bad when compared to "native" competitors. The exception here are applications like Eclipse, which you start when you get in from work and don't quit until you're done. But for most other apps, e.g. utility apps which you just want to quickly use and close, or workflows where you switch between multiple apps frequently, Java is just not suited.
Very rarely do we have to resort to doing major grunt work on the server as opposed to doing it in the Java client.
You're missing the point royally. Java isn't slow at doing grunt work. Few people would contest that. But as a platform to write desktop applications, it is a pig. The Swing UI is slow and prone to memory leaks, data interchange facilities are poor (even the clipboard functionality integrates poorly with the surrounding environment), memory requirements are completely uncontrollable.
Yes, Java does requisition a lot of memeory when an untweaked JVM starts up, but the inmpact depends on the machine running the program.
Indeed, and that's why most Java shops pretty much only run one application on their servers.
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory".
The fundamental problem is that you cannot control how memory gets used. For example: the JVM allocates memory from the underlying OS in chunks which it then doles out to your app as necessary. Then at garbage collection time, the memory is reclaimed from your app and returned to the JVM. But then the JVM may or may not ever return this memory to the underlying OS. This means that even if you have a tiny application, when the user opens a mammoth 100MB document just once, the application will continue using 100MB even after the user has closed the document.
Yes, this is sort of tunable through commandline options and other properties, but then only for some versions of some implementations of the JVM. Which brings us back to the first point, that it's a hassle to deliver hassle-free Java applications. It's so troublesome in fact that some programmers choose to simply distribute a JVM along with their apps.
The bottomline is this: Java is a cool language, but it just doesn't play nice with others. It insists on reinventing everything, it insists on abstracting everything, and it insists on total control over the environment. That's fine for in-house apps or web apps, but it limits Java's adoption on the desktop.
And ultimately, I think it condemns Java to a perpetual "behind the scenes" existance, growing ever more baroque appendages in its invisible niche, until its burdensome legacy is swept away by something more open.
why bother arguing (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is you have some people who are super java fan boys and will stand by it until the day they die and most of them probably haven't programmed enough in other languages to say anything but the few bad experiences they did have.
Don't think I am letting the C/C++ programmers off either. I am one of them and I will be the first to admit I have hardly ever used java, but I have also had enough first-hand bad experience to not want to use it.
The fact is that people will stick with they know best and odds are whichever you learned first (java or c++) that will more than likely be the one you spend the majority of your time working with. So half the people can continue to rip on java now and the rest of you can praise it. I do digital design so I don't care enough about code to get into this argument.
--
"The same thing we do every night Pinky; Try to take over the world!"
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:4, Insightful)
``Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.''
And a 20 MB download that takes dog knows how many megabytes after installation. Also, the whole process will have to be repeated at the next release, as chances are software developed on a newer version won't run on an older one.
``Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.''
Most applications don't need a lot of speed once up and running, anyway. Startup time is a huge annoyance, to me anyway. Is it really that hard to save the compiled code, so next time the JIT doesn't have to work again?
``java applications have slow, unresponsive user interfaces--- on slower machines, using java-based user interfaces can be frustrating (resizing the application window can mean taking a coffee break).
That's strange, it must be their inability to code an interface and data models in an efficient manner.''
I don't know about your systems, but on any system I have used in the past years, user interfaces in Java apps are noticeably more sluggish than in native ones. Perhaps this is perceived performance, but arguably it's the perceived performance that matters for user interfaces.
``java applications leak memory
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory".''
Yes, but isn't it symptomatic of defects in the language if many programs written in it leak memory? Besides, isn't Java's garbage collection supposed to take care of things? Personally, I believe that there was an issue with old JVMs (at least on Linux) leaking memory, that has now been solved. At any rate, I think that kast's author is being more bitter than rational when he says things might be better without gc. Gc is a Good Thing, after all, memory allocation and deallocation is excactly the sort of task that machines are good at and humans are not. It can even speed up programs under some circumstances.
Re:As is the case with most languages.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:False arguments of past not valid (Score:1, Insightful)
They're hardly stupid if they're correct. Java being `ofter very fast` doesn't make it faster than C++, especially when the C++ code concerned has been written and optimized for a given CPU whereas Java has to do compilation on the fly.
Re:Return of Java (Score:4, Insightful)
Further investigation revealed that the code sucked. It was nothing to do with Java. A re-write brought the Web sessions down to about 100 bytes each. It is now a happy app.
Moral of the story: there is good code and bad code in any language.
(Having said that, the JVM does take an awfully long time to bootstrap...)
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:3, Insightful)
That is SO not the point. Why the hell should a, for example, 55 year old occasional computer user need to even know WHAT Java is, let alone UNDERSTAND why they need to install it?
Surely the uppermost aim for any software engineer / developer / designer is to hide complexity from the user?
I have two roles at my work: the first is as an IT Project Manager and the second is in a Procurement role for 3rd-party software development effort (i.e. a Client). If the technical-lead on a project or a supplier ever told me that "all the user needs to do" is to "just" download and install anything (including Java) to run their application I would throw them out the door / off the project!
This is as absurd as priming your fuel pump everytime you want to drive somewhere, or calibrating your derailleur gears before you can use your bicycle.
Not acceptable!!
Re:There has been some good alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
So, please dont come with those crap arguments, because they are not true.
But what is true; c++ will always be faster than java,
What must be really annoying, is that
Re:Return of Java (Score:2, Insightful)
Well 256MB of RAM is barely adequate for most Java apps or development in my experience.
I've been doing server-side Java development for a little over 4 years now, and we've never had a performance problem.
Geez. I guess you've never tried running a non-trivial web application on a webserver where your Tomcat only gets allocated 64mb RAM (and where every extra mb costs you $$$ per month). Admittedly the idea that Java is slow usually comes from people using Swing which isn't an issue for server-side applications.
Re:Return of Java (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds nice in theory. In practice for most Java enterprise applications the memory usage is by far the biggest bottleneck. The hotspot compiler can't change this.
For example, I did a fair few speed tests working with strings in Java. For example, comparing various search and replace algorithms. The entire difference between the faster algorithms and the slower ones was how they handled the memory usage.
Strings are only a simple construct, but even with these Java is horribly inefficient unless great care is taken by the programmer to use them efficiently. In contrast, when programming C++ I can use strings paying scant regard to efficiency and know my code will virtually always be faster than any Java program doing the same thing.
Re:Return of Java (Score:3, Insightful)
You probably wouldn't want to use it for high-performance graphics for example, but it's great for developing most standard apps.
If you really need to eek out the last nanosecond of performance, do not use java. Java will never be able to match the speed of writing to the metal. But I don't see why you wouldn't want to use it for a client-server app where nanosecond performance isn't critical.
Java is a programming tool just like any other. Only a fool throws out a tool merely on the basis of not knowing how to use it.
~X~
Re:Keyword being: Enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Run Eclipse sometime.
Re:Java is NOT slow (Score:2, Insightful)
Three things have changed: broadband has meant that applets are not as slow to load as they used to be; machines have got faster; and JVMs have got better (including plugins).
In the project I'm working on (I'm a Java developer, mostly servlet/JSP/struts) we're deploying an applet to provide a richer user experience which HTML alone would not provide. I would not have dreamt of providing this solution even a year ago.
The applet is very usable, only takes a second to load the first time it's used (and thereafter is cached) and the user has a better experience of our product. We're telling our customers to use JRE 1.4.2.
The trick is to use applets when they are appropriate. This is, after all, true of all technologies.
I believe that eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ [eclipse.org] and netbeans http://www.netbeans.org/ [netbeans.org] have both made a huge contribution to showing how Java applications can be used for serious development projects. There is now a huge amount of support for the Java development community, with lots of free libraries (Apache Foundation rocks http://www.apache.org/ [apache.org]!) and some great stuff coming out of Sun (Java Server Faces).
Put it all together and you have a very rich environment for creating serious multi-tier applications using web or application front-ends.
For me, the icing on the cake would be the development of a forms standard which allows application-like front ends with a web architecture. Maybe XForms? XUL? This is what our customers want. Combine it with a strict and workable MVC architecture and it'd be my perfect development environment!
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:3, Insightful)
This makes it a pain if you want to deliver an application to the user with minimal hassle.
Not really. There is Java WebStart which solves this issue. Commericial products like InstallAnywhere solved this also. Old issue.
Java's "slowness" has at least three components: startup time, garbage collection delays, and the huge footprint which triggers swap activity.
Start up time is slow. It takes approx a couple seconds. Ofcourse this is a one time cost that interpreted languages go through. C# has the same problem.
Garbage collection delays? Ive never seen this as a big problem. With good coding practice (create fewer objects, reuse etc) this becomes invisible.
Memory swapping? You must have a mighty large java app or very little memory. As for java being a memory pig that is questionable since IE, mozilla, and about a dozen other apps I run on my computer consume more memory than my java apps like Azurues. Go figure.
It insists on reinventing everything, it insists on abstracting everything, and it insists on total control over the environment.
I just wrote a java app the other day that embeds an activeX control within it. Worked great. Ive written C++ apps that use Java (gcj) and it worked great. I think youll have a hard job trying to prove that strange view.
I think it condemns Java to a perpetual "behind the scenes" existance, growing ever more baroque appendages in its invisible niche, until its burdensome legacy is swept away by something more open
Java is already open. Go look at projects like GNU classpath or Kaffe. Javas invisible niche is kinda hard to miss since it covers most IT departments here in the United States and abroad. A bit hard to miss. You can go to SourceForge and see that it is currently almost exceeded the number of C and C++ apps.
Your example more fits C# at its ilk which has had very slow adoption.
Monkey (Score:5, Insightful)
Centralized web services are capturing the hearts and minds of a lot of companies anymore. Clients for such services can be thin or fat and can run whatever OS is practical. An office full of iMacs can access a web service just as well as an office full of HPs running Linux. If Java is ditched down the road for Perl or Python the database server isn't going to go tits up.
Java's death never really happened, it's just that its success came from an area no one really expected early on. Perl's met with similar success. What started off as a language to parse server logs and turn huge data files into meaningful information became the premiere CGI language on the web. While a successful word processor might never be written in Java, the language and environment are far from dead.
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it's not symtomatic of a bad language, but that a lot of programmers don't know how to properly manage their objects. Whenever I'm called over to look at a java memory leak it's one of two things - people put hard references in static containers that never get cleared, or they initialize objects with circular reference that don't unwind properly. Blaming Java for bad programming is just wrong.
People often use garbage collection as an excuse to be lazy. "I don't have to worry about it, the garbage collector will take care of it". I'm sorry to say, garbage collectors are not not the silver bullet to bad programming.
Re:Return of Java (Score:2, Insightful)
If you really need to eek out the last nanosecond of performance, do not use java. Java will never be able to match the speed of writing to the metal.
Yah, just like one wouldn't want to use a platform-independent lib like OpenGL to write high-performance graphics, you'd want to go straight to the metal...oh wait... (You should take a look at JOGL [java.net] by the way.)
In the same vein, one would never want to use C++ for high-performance code, one would rather write straight C, or better yet assembler...ooops...
Your argument has two fallacies - one is that Java can never be as fast as C or FORTRAN (not true).
The second is that it is worth any amount of effort to pry the last few percent of performance out of a system (not true either, unless said lack of performance is a fatal error, i.e. hard realtime).
Hope that helped...
Re:Return of Java (Score:1, Insightful)
Well you know most of the people writing in Java are programmers too.
Re:The Reason Java 'appears' slow, (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure that MVC is the problem, though. It's been widely used in a variety of systems since the late '70s on processors that aren't even pocket-calculator quality today. The Smalltalk I played with in 1982 was running on a Dorado that must have managed all of a million instructions per second, and my NextStation (however that's supposed to be capitalised) has a very responsive GUI on a 68030... it actually feels faster than OS X on a G3/400. Java's implementation of MVC may be particularly bad, but the inherent overhead in the design can't be that great if machines as anemic as these can manage it well.
I would put the responsibility for Aqua's performance squarely on the shoulders of Quartz. Quartz is a high quality rendering engine, but to get decent performance out of it you need a good video subsystem and enormous amounts of memory to copy and composite the high resolution pre-rendered bitmaps... not to mention enough processor time to do print-quality rendering in the first place. I expect that Microsoft's next generation video subsystem will be equally aggressive.
Re:Return of Java (Score:2, Insightful)
Java code just isn't the hideously slow crap it was when it first because popular. Once the VM is up, it runs quite snappy save for some of the older and trashier widget toolkits. BUT, it still takes some time to load the VM on my 2GHz+ machine, and still takes too much memory (>16MB for the VM), and that's still no good.
The C/C++ code you've worked with is either just plain bad, or you don't know what to look for. I can always optimize my code to be faster than equivalent Java.
Write your Java code because it's the best choice, not because for the sake of being a language bigot. Java has it's uses, C/C++ has it's uses, and so does Assembly.
Re:Return of Java (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why so many people develop with dynamic languages. Bloat isn't just at the runtime side of things; it's at development time too.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2, Insightful)
Me too.
Java apologists are funny that way.
When you get right down to it, a tight-loop algorithm using only native keywords and operators CAN'T be as fast in Java; it's interpreted.
All the cognitive dissonance you can throw at that fact can't change it, but the apologists keep trying anyway.
To be fair, I *do* like Java; as a teaching tool so students can pick up programming basics.
But if I had my way, everyone would learn assembler FIRST, because to my mind, that is the only true way of understanding what is REALLY going on in the computer.
I think that that is also why C (and C++) are so succesful and will never go away; they're the languages that map closest to assembler and are therefore relevant.
Until we design a computer that DOESN'T operate on the same principle as current ones do, C and C++ are never going away, and Java will always need apologists.
Re:There has been some good alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the J2EE market has been going strong for a whi (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Keyword being: Enterprise (Score:3, Insightful)
With the exception of Eclipse and Azureus (both using SWT) Java on the desktop has been an abysmal failure. If it was up to Sun it would have been dead and buried a long time ago. There are however a few things that could revive the Java desktop platform:
1. Open Source Java, allowing it to be distributed with Linux.
2. Allowing bundling of the JRE with end user applications, you just can't expect users to download it themselves. If you believe that you just haven't spent enough time with end users.
3. Be ready to make some hard decisions or watch Java rot from the inside. What the hell is up with the ridiculous "generics" implementation, now we're stuck with this autocasting-lite crap for the foreseeable future because Sun didn't want to modify the VM even a little. Very shortsighted of them.
However Sun won't do it, because there's no profit in it for them. However that's nothing new, it seems like everyone else is making money with Java except for Sun. I predict that in a few years IBM will be the defacto Java driver.
Re:The Reason Java 'appears' slow, (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Keyword being: Enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Believe it or not, I've been in client side application projects. I also have Eclipse open right now.
In fact, Eclipse is the prime example of how Sun started on the wrong foot. SWT (the widget set used by Eclipse) is IBM's work, while AWT and Swing are what Sun had in mind. The words "dumb and dumber" come to mind, when I think about AWT and Swing.
Want one thing that an actual client complained about? We had to program the same very small app in C _and_ Java, on Windows, Linux _and_ MacOS. Well, the whole package were more apps, but this was the only part which had to run on all desktops.
The client's first comment? "Whoa! Why does the Java version need 16 MB of RAM, when the C one is less than 1 MB?"
Another project was a bigger Swing "thick client" database program. In Swing. You know what the first complaint was? The look and feel. Inconsistent fonts, inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, etc. Sun's "Windows" Look and Feel is a sick joke. We ended up doing more work to write our own look and feel, just to get the program to look like a native app.
Yet another way in which SWT got it right, while Sun screwed up.
The second complaint? Performance and memory use. 'Nuff said.
Also, believe it or not, bigger companies have tried moving to Java on the desktop. It was every company's wet dream to suddenly only have to maintain one version, and work on every single OS. Some of which they didn't even support before. Everyone tried it.
E.g., Corel at one point wanted to move their whole office packet to Java.
Why do you think Microsoft got so scared and wanted to kill Java? Precisely because of this. It looked like all of a sudden everything will be multi-platform, and the "but this and that runs only under Windows" advantage will evaporate over night.
What happened to all those projects? They flopped. They ended up slow, bloated and more unstable than their Windows counterparts. So everyone moved back to C/C++.
If that doesn't count as a monumental flop, I don't know what does.
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it utterly hilarious that people say that Swing proves Java is fast, because the really fast parts aren't written in Java.
Swing is called a light-weight gui since it has no native peers. This means there are no native widgets in otherwords. Whoever said Swing is fast?
Azurues uses SWT. SWT is not Swing. SWT uses native widgets. SWT is generally faster than swing because of this.
BUT what people dont get is why Swing exists. SWT, although faster, operates differently on different platforms and looks different. Windows widgets look different than GTK or Qt based ones. SWT problems is the same as any other cross-platform gui like WxWindows. Swing though always looks the same no matter what the platform is. This means Swing apps look and operate the same no matter what the platform.
Re:Return of Java (Score:1, Insightful)
Until GNU Classpath is complete, the Java standard is *not* free.
In order to really be a Java "implementation", you need all the runtime classes (java.awt.*, java.io.*, etc.) in java.* . Most enterprise Java developers will also need the runtime classes in javax.* to meet the J2EE specification.
Remember, the Java runtime is both the JVM and the classes/interfaces. The former has been freed, the latter is only about half done.
Re:GC should handle circular references (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that if you've got a circular loop of, say, 15 objects, and a reference to a single object. The GC can't get rid of the fourteen other objects (or whatever part of them are actually redundant) because there exist references to them all. If that ciruclar reference were not present, then the GC can destruct all the objects without direct references.
Note that a manually managed memory model wouldn't nessecerily help in that situation - if you free() the objects you no longer need, not noticing that there is a cirular reference, you can end up with a particularly painful to sort out segmentation fault if you later acess that ciruclar reference (probably in a call to free() itself).
We're comparing apples to oranges here (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's not what Java is being used for. The most common usage of Java is for high volume dynamic web sites such as Amazon.com and most online banking systems. The combination of Java servlets, Java Server Pages and Java based web engines (WebSphere or Web Logic for example, or even Apache and Tomcat) are becoming the most common usage of Java.
I work at a major California bank and have worked on various web based applications for about 9 years. Java is the standard for writing those types of dynamic web apps. For example. When you want to see your financial summary you wouldn't expect that there is somebody writing a web page just for you every time to make an ATM transaction would you? Of course not. You log in and we identify you. Then we go to an Oracle database or a bank host system and get your transaction history. We load that into a data object and pass it to a JSP which dynamically creates the web page with your transaction history. Java excels at that kind of application. And by the way, I can develop my code in Windows 2000, move it to a Linux box to do some basic testing, and then move it (all without recompiling) to an IBM AIX Unix box and have everything work the same on all these different environments. That makes my job easier.
So we need to stop comparing apples to oranges and saying things that essentially sum up to "A badly written Java program is slower than a well written C program" or "Java was slow 6 years ago so it's still slow today" or "I don't agree with the language designer's choice of [properties, no operator overloading or whatever language peeve you have]". Look at how the language is actually being used and you'll see that Java is indeed alive and well.
Re:Why *I* don't use java! (Score:1, Insightful)
1. Strangely, despite developing in Java for years, I've never once met James Gosling or anyone else involved with developing Java. Clearly I'm doing something wrong. I don't actually believe that using Java in any way constitutes an approval of the lifestyle and behaviour of people I have never met.
2. Yes, you're right. Java stops you from drawing anything to the screen if its inbuilt filters detect anything 'pretty'. Or could it be that lazy programmers develop ugly apps? I'll admit that a good GUI takes some effort in Java, but I can choose to do something about it.
3. It might be slow, but at least it knows the value of the CAPS LOCK KEY
4. Imagine.. Microsoft submits c# to the ecma. Then they change it, breaking hundreds of APIs in the next version and submit that to the ecma. But it's OK, because it's a standard. Sun on the other hand have managed to release seven major versions of Java without too much problem, support deprecated APIs beyond all reasonable expectations and provide comprehensive validation tools to allow people developing JVMs to guarantee that they are compatible at many levels.
5. Not correct. For that matter, has Mono been ecma approved, and has it any assurance that Microsoft won't close it down for relying on patented Microsoft technology? Is Mono guaranteed to be compatible, and to still work when Microsoft upgrades to the next version? So far Mono is the only other implementation of Net. Compare that with the huge eco-system of languages and JVMs that have been developed around the Java platform.
Re:Return of Java (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't it rather pathetic that something like your example of
out.writeln("Cheese is "+good?"good":"bad")+"!");
is a 'bad thing' to do in Java? Personally I find it the natural way to do things, and much nicer than your second example. I hardly think I'm alone in this. Virtually all languages use the former idiom as opposed to the latter (or have an even nicer syntax). If you find the former not nice, I could suggest:
String cheeseType = (good?"good":"bad);
out.writeln("Cheese is " + cheeseType + "\n");
The String API isn't too shabby. It's much better than being forced into writting your own routines, or having to include 3rd party libraries to achieve the desired effect, which is the case with most compiled languages.
Huh???? C# provides a nice string class. So does C++. They're essentially Java's competitors, so no idea where you're coming from there.
Re:There has been some good alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you're referring to Gtk# as an alternative to Windows.Forms. That's not really going to help, as the majority of C#/.NET coding is going to be targetted primarily at Windows, where Gtk# is not going to be the first choice.
I did notice in the comments for the linked article, that Miguel mentions work is underway on Windows.Forms support for Mono. That would be quite an achievement, and one that would *really* make Mono a viable cross platform alternative to Java.
Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... (Score:1, Insightful)
The Windows users should not care that its a Java app and thus people they don't know who run the app on a Mac will get the same experience. This is the flaw of Java Swing.
Chip
I don't use Java (Score:3, Insightful)
Java is a good language. Yes, there are issues, but they could be resolved by Sun fairly easily. But, in most cases, Java simply isn't needed. Statistics show that the vast majority of software applications being developed are not "mass market" type apps but rather stuff that is used in house. Most shops have standardized around one platform or another so cross platform isn't really an issue. And, when it is, it's usually trivial to edit C code and recompile for the new arch.
Lastly, let me tell you a little story: I am currently launching a new startup aimed at developing a kiosk for the entertainment industry. Originally, everyone said I simply *had* to write my software in Java because of an infinate number of reasons. Even as an experienced programmer, I was dumb enough to buy into it and try. Within a few weeks the software had become so slow and bloated that I knew I had to find something else. Where do you think I went?
Python with the WX extensions.
Python offers me everything Java can (WORA, Speed, Good GUI enviroment, etc) and is absolutley painless to learn. In fact, I am LEARNING the language AS I write the new software and it's not slowing me up at all. There are times I have to go back and fix things but usually it's pretty straightforward. Python is, to me at least, a Java killer.
I think that Java has some strong points. But, ultimately, it's no stronger that some other languages out ther (think C++, Python) and in some ways weaker. Sun needs to do something to get Java back on track. They can save the language but they need to drop the arrogance and get back down to basics.
Re:like a turtle (Score:2, Insightful)
Some turtles are oddly enough, fast as heck.
Even box turtles can go really fast when they want to. (Oh crud, where did the little bugger go? Ahh!!!)
I think it'd be nice if Sun did some sort of multi-platform automatic binary distrobution system instead of that darn VM, Java itself is a nice language, the API is simple to use for many many things, the only issue is the darn VM!
If compiled binaries were more common, or even some sort of limited compiled binaries, compiled to the LOWEST level possible and still be run in a sandbox, I think Java would have a better chance.
I mean heck, how many plateforms are there REALLY browsing the Internet? Three: Windows, Macintosh, Linux.
For most applets, multibinary support would not add THAT much more size to the applet, since most of the size of an applet is likely to be in the graphics and sound department anyways.
Oh yah, talking about graphics and sound:
Sun: STOP IT WITH THE MINIMAL LEVEL OF SUPPORT CRUD!
2.4Ghz machine;
800x600 resolution;
Instanciating a new Color object to draw random lines: 100% of my CPU use.
Head --> Wall
*POUND* *POUND* *POUND* *POUND*
stupidstupidstupidstupid.
This is not even counting how slow doing other graphical operations is, ugh! Please, sun, optimize Swing on a per machine basis!! On Windows it should automatically take advantage of DirectX, on OSX, Quartz, on Linux, umm, whatever Linux uses (MESA? Err, no clue).
Annnnyways. Aside from the, umm, performance issues (which ARE a killer), and the graphical issues, oh, yes, wait, one more mini-rant on graphics and Java.
People complain that making a GUI in Java is a pain, indeed, it IS a pain, but you know, compared to other APIs, it is not ALL that bad. Just a bit odd at times, having to work with a lowest common denominator toolkit. Actually it is NOT truely crossplateform, as the dude with the Mac OSX Laptop in my class wrote GUIs that didn't "look right" on Windows and the rest of the class on Windows wrote GUIs that didn't look right on his box. ^_^ Oh well, they were USEABLE more or less, only a bit of overlap between elements, hehe.
Yah, umm, that was good for a couple of laughs.
Oh yah, the language.
Fun to program in, very interesting, makes me WANT to program, easy to use.
Just performance bites. Horribly.