Does an Open Java Really Matter? 766
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the relevance of the recent opening of Java given the wealth of options open source developers enjoy today. Sure, as the first full-blooded Java implementation available under a 100 percent Free Software license, RedHat's IcedTea pushes aside open source objections to developing in Java. Yet, McAllister asks, if Java really were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose? 'The problem, as I see it, is twofold,' he writes. 'First, as the Java platform has matured, it has become incredibly complex. Today it's possible to do anything with Java, but no one developer can do everything — there simply aren't enough hours in the day to learn it all. Second, and most important, 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.'" Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.
Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Some would say the same about Slashdot.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that was a really lame comment. Does Rob think the programming world consists of Perl hackers like him? Thousands of programmers make a living writing Java code.
BTW Rob, when is the new browsing system going to handle scores correctly? I just started writing a response to a Score 0 AC post, something I never do intentionally. Maybe if you rewrote Slashdot in Java...
But here's why opening Java matters. When people talk about "opening Java" they really mean "opening Sun's implementation of Java". There have always been open-source implementations of Java, but they've had a hard time keeping up with the latest spec. So if you're distributing open-source software that depends on Java, you really want Sun's Java implementation in the bundle.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Funny)
No Multiple Inheritance. Slower than a 486. Lame.
Multiple Inheritance (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring the parent troll for a moment, can someone please show an example of where multiple implementation inheritance is superior (not just equivalent) to multiple interfaces and the composition design pattern?
I've really tried to find a case, but ultimately fail. I even tend to agree with Gosling that abstract classes were a bad idea. On the other hand, I can name innumerable cases where MI causes more problems than it solves.
Re:Multiple Inheritance (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignoring the parent troll for a moment, can someone please show an example of where multiple implementation inheritance is superior (not just equivalent) to multiple interfaces and the composition design pattern?
If you're going to say that, you might as well go as far as saying that inheritance itself has no merit when Java has its interfaces instead. And I'd argue that you'd have a point.
After all, inheritance is just a convenient way of taking functions from some other implementation of an interface and making your own implementation use those same functions. In that regard multiple inheritance makes sense, since you'd be able to pull in code from all over the place easily. But, one might argue that it should
Interesting point (Score:5, Insightful)
And if code bases never changed, I might agree with you. However, what happens when a superclass is changed, e.g., a new method is added? Much of the time, nothing. But what happens with MI when one superclass adds a method that already exists by name in another superclass? You end up in exactly the same solution as with SI; you use composition to arbitrate the ambiguity.
When interfaces collide, there is no issue. If a method is added to a superclass in single-inheritance, it rarely affects the subclass unless that subclass is too tightly coupled with private variables (the implementation) of the superclass; you'd be hosed with any change in the superclass.
MI may result in slightly fewer lines of code, but it makes for code that's harder to understand and more brittle in the long run. In short, it's little more than syntactic sugar with no programmatic benefits but several drawbacks with regard to complexity.
Re:Multiple Inheritance (Score:4, Insightful)
You're asking for an objective answer to a subjective question. What's "superior" in this context? A Java person would say code that easy to debug and maintain. A C++ person would say code that's expressive and concise. Both are right — within their own circle of peers.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe if you rewrote Slashdot in Java...
... then Slashdot could finally get slashdotted?
** ducks **
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest complaint with Java web development is that most of the libraries, toolkits and frameworks are massively over-engineered, and that causes many Java projects to be massively over-engineered. Google probably needs the flexibility, extensibility and scalability the libraries provide. Not so much for the internal web apps that Java gets used on so often.
I can't count the number of times I've seen Java web apps running on massive servers providing functionality that could easily be provided by some Perl scripts running on a machine a fraction of the size.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:4, Funny)
Ya, i read it on slashdot [slashdot.org].
Re:Mod parent funny! (Score:5, Funny)
Holy crap, you're right! I haven't seen that trick pulled since here [slashdot.org].
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
At least in this case, AC was right.
Whereas Taco, in this case... not so much.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been nearly 11 YEARS. I think it's time you bury the hatchet.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Informative)
You are also missing that the GWT that runs most of the apps on Google (like Gmail) is written in Java. Java's GUI has issues but that does not mean that Java does not have good uses.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think VBA is in wider use then Java.
Meh. Cranking out spreadsheet macros for arbs and margin traders doesn't count as programming. And I'm not certain what metric anyone is using here.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:4, Interesting)
I will say the J-word once again. May the Emperor forgive me.
Try writing this: http://dimiter.dyndns.org/sqema/index.jsp [dyndns.org] in anything *but* Java, and make it faster. Then we'll talk again.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Funny)
1999 called, they want their trolls back.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
The good thing with an open java is that it's possible to port to a broader range of architectures with less concern for licensing issues.
Some may claim that Java is a bastard of Ada and C (or was it C++) but it's not really the case. Ada is a bit locked up in a limited market, which is a bit unfortunate - but things like that happens. If the licensing and availability of Ada had been better then we might have been programming Ada instead of Java.
And more important is that C# (C-hash as I call it) is created by Microsoft because they weren't allowed by Sun to create a diverged version of Java. And Microsoft always tries to get their own way so we will have to accept that. But some of us may still remember that there were applets around written for Microsoft's JVM and that they did only work in IE - while at the same time other applets didn't work in M$:s JVM.
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Java never really mattered, Taco? Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it can be done - I have limited experience with the language - but I'd imagine device drivers would be a pain to program in Java. Somehow, I just can't see nVidia using it to program their 280 series.
Manual memory management would be another thing. Unless there's a nifty library out there that I missed (and there very well could be!), Java lacks anything that makes it suitable for kernel development, process scheduling, and the like.
Game programming I'd think would be doable, if they have good DirectX libraries and an SDK that works well.
But... other than really bare-to-the-metal stuff? Java should be able to do practically everything. Not that it would be my first choice for a lot of things, mind you.
Java never mattered (Score:5, Insightful)
"Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters."
What an ignorant and irresponsible editorial comment. Care to substantiate that claim, or even clarify what it means for a language to "matter?"
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe that the editor put that comment. I'm not a huge fan of Java, but that's incredibly ignorant.
Suggested tag: flamebait
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What do you expect from someone that still uses perl?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I really don't understand the "cool" factor in claiming bullshit that hasn't happened in years. Sure if you used Java in 2001 it was slow, unresponsive, and annoying. This is especially true when Java programmers didn't write very Thread friendly code on an event (such as clicking a button). Anyway has no one ever run Java in a server environment? You know there is more to Java than desktop apps and those run very well. As a matter of fact, many websites run off of Tomcat without you knowing it (which is a
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Informative)
Python is the only language I'm aware of (certainly the only major language) that uses whitespace to define blocks. Thank God. It's a *serious* dealbreaker for me.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, of course, that Python doesn't provide enough context for an editor to properly indent blocks automatically, as there's no proper block delimiters. So, if I, for example, need to change the level of nesting in an existing block of code for some reason (say, introducing an if statement, or factoring some code out into a separate function), the editor can't help me to ensure I get the indentation level right. And in Python, incorrect indentation means incorrect semantics.
Sorry, it *is* a deal-breaker.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you have the region marked out, most editors can indent that region for you.
Really! Okay, here's some code:
print "Hello"
print "World"
Now, I want you to insert the statement 'if (true):' at the top of that code, such that the print statements execute within the context of the if statement, and I want you to use the editor to indent the code. Hey, you know what, don't bother, I'll show you what you get:
if (true):
print i
print i + 1
But, of course, that's not what I wanted at all. I wanted this:
if (true):
print i
print i + 1
The problem is, the editor has no idea what I want because, without understanding the semantics of the code, the fact that blocks aren't properly delimited means the editor can only guess as to the correct indentation for a given hunk of code.
Of course, this is a very simple example. But it also doesn't even approach the sheer hell that is refactoring larger bodies of Python code.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugh, apparently I need to choose a more explicit example, as you're too thick to understand. Let's say I have this:
if (true):
print "Hello World"
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
Now, insert the for loop into the if statement, before print statement, and use the editor to reindent the block. And good luck.
Meanwhile, with C, I'd have:
if (1) {
printf("Hello World\n");
}
for (i = 0; i 10; i++) {
printf("%d\n", i);
printf("%d\n", i + 1);
}
I could then just copy the for loop, past it into the if block, get the editor to reindent, and voila, the code is correct.
*Now* do you get it? Please god, say you get it...
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Funny)
I edit code like $DIETY intended: with vi. When I insert a tab, then BY $DIETY I expect 0x09 to be inserted into my ASCII-only, 7-bit-safe, mostly-human-readable text file.
Heh. That sounds like a crotchety-old-programmer joke, and it is, except it's not entirely a joke. I really do use vi as my primary coding editor. I guess I just like the pain; it reminds me I'm alive.
And the crotchety old programmer bit? That's not a joke either. Now get off my lawn, you emacs-using kids!
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure he was being facetious. Everyone knows Java is in heavy use in various industries. Lighten up.
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows Java is in heavy use in various industries
particularly Publishing and eCommerce :-)
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience is in investment banking and every single bank I've ever heard of write the majority of their buisiness-critical server-side apps in Java. Hedge funds too. Any place where you want to quickly develop large server-side in-house apps, you can do that much more reliably with Java and you have access to a huge talent pool of developers. The reality is that the systems that drive the economy are written in Java. Some trivial MP3 catalog GUI, bulletin boards or throwaway websites don't really turn the wheels of capitalism I'm afraid.
It seems Taco has basically doesn't understand how I.T. in the real world actually works. My advice to him is to quit whining and accept the ideological war against Java has already been lost years and years ago. Java is huge, deal with it. That's a reality that won't go away just because you post a throw away editorial comment on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the joke, really, is that Java is used to power the systems in a lot of eCommerce sites (think eBay or Amazon) and Publishing (if you consider some of the big online media sites to be publishing).
So is it a joke, or is it a serious comment, which is it? Is it true, or is it false? :-)
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Funny)
He must be referring to Amazon's use of Java.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it uses a bunch of technologies, including C++, Java, Perl, and much more. Here [highscalability.com] are some specifics.
Re:Java never mattered (Score:5, Funny)
Java isn't just for selling books. Look at how many Java libraries are around.
Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
How many times have you been screwed over by a vendor who thinks they know best? (Symantec / L0phtcrack anyone?)
"Java never mattered"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it funny that we have statements like "Java never mattered except to sell books", while I distinctly remember hordes of posters on this very site only a few years ago, rabidly arguing that Java is the best thing ever and that nobody will be using anything but Java in the future. Now, we have hordes of Ruby, Python, and what-not advocates saying the same things. I guess it's their turn. I'll just keep my C++, thank you very much, which nobody advocates these days, and everyone says is obsolete, too complicated, and inherently broken. Go ahead, mod me as flamebait! I'm used to it.
Re:"Java never mattered"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Java never mattered"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the whole C++ is "obsolete, too complicated, and inherently broken" and isn't advocated these days is that it remains the language of choice for real complex scientific and engineering challenges, especially time-critical/real-time systems, which the newer languages typically don't address well.
Re:"Java never mattered"? (Score:5, Funny)
C++ will always have a place in my heart & I'll use it when ever practical.
Don't you mean &&?
Re:"Java never mattered"? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I should know by now to expect most people to not know what they're talking about when they post.
But, back to the issue. I fully agree with many other posters claiming it reduces the possibility of being screwed over by Sun or licensing inside of the various packages (audio is one that comes to mind - the one they're still rewriting).
Re:"Java never mattered"? (Score:4, Informative)
surely that is a little harsh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:surely that is a little harsh (Score:4, Insightful)
Taco's just being provocative. He's smarter than that.
Re:surely that is a little harsh (Score:5, Insightful)
Use debian? (Score:5, Informative)
If you've ever wanted to run a Java app on a debian box, you know why this matters.
The strictly FOSS distros have historically refused to include a Java package due to its non-Free license. There's some really good Java software out there, and without a pre-built java package, it was just that much harder to access them.
Re:Use debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a good point. LAMP became a one-checkbox install because it's FOSS. LAMJ could easily have been. Except it's not a very catchy acronym.
Personally I'd like to see LAPJ: Linux, Apache, Postgres, Java.
Anyway, love it or hate it, Java has reached the critical mass to be around for a long time.
Arbitrary (Score:3, Informative)
You have limits in any language whether they be the inclusion of a semicolon at the end of a statement, the enclosure of a conditional in parentheses, or curly braces to denote scope.
To say that those constructs built into languages are acceptable but enforced indentation is not is an arbitrary distinction. It has nothing to do with its worth or lack thereof. You have decided what you prefer and are fitting an argument to that conclusion. Philosophy does not enter into it.
A computer doesn't care whether
Java doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
If elephants could fly... (Score:5, Insightful)
if Java really were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose
If Windows were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose?
Who cares. It's not today that it's released, and the importance of availability, mind-share and already developed applications around it, gives it a clear importance, even if you have better hammers for your particular nail.
Submission needs -1 Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
>>
Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.
>>
The day job could buy an awful lot of books with the $X0 million worth of Big Freaking Enterprise Apps we have written in (mostly) Java. Its like any other tool: there are some places where it makes excellent sense, some where it does not, and I have my own personal tastes for when I would use it or not. (Cards on the table: I do proprietary desktop Java development in my spare time and BFEwebA at the day job, but have been mixing in a bit of Rails programming lately.)
At the end of the day, what matters is "Does Java help us make our customers happy?" It does. Despite how skull-crushingly boring writing CRUD apps can be, for our customers having the things available and working means the difference kissing their kids at 6 PM or being stuck at the office at 2 AM wondering if they will still have a job in 5 hours.
So how does opening Java matter? Well, even in an extraordinarily mature platform, you'll sometimes find weird, off the wall, how the heck did that happen issues with particular combinations of software. Enterprise Computing = combinitorially explosive numbers of possible adverse reactions. We've got at least 150 packages in the system, many of which have to interoperate with code which has not seen the light of day since the mid-90s.
You'd think the odds of actually having to touch stuff deep in the bowels of the infrastructure are pretty low, but believe it or not we have our own little fork of, e.g, Tomcat 4.1 in production use *to this day* to get around a particular classloader issue that got fixed in later releases. (We can't upgrade that particular customer at the moment. Its a long story and if you've ever worked in industry you've heard the basic gist before.) Java being open means there is one less place for issues to be totally inaccessible should we need to work around them.
It matters to Sun... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun is loosing ground to .NET, so they have to regain developer. I have to admit that Open Java is very appealing to me, since I feel that the language/platform does have something unique to offer that is not available anywhere else.
Furthermore, I don't care what anyone says about .NET/Mono. It is a closed Microsoft technology that Mono will perpetually play catch-up to. It cannot replace what (Open) Java has to offer.
If it weren't for Python, sure (Score:5, Interesting)
We're a Python shop. It does everything Java does that we need it to do, but is actually fun to write. If Python disappeared tomorrow, though, Java would be a no-brainer. It's cross-platform and wouldn't leave us beholden to the good wishes of Redmond.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Informative)
Java is slow?
Python has the Global Interpreter Lock, which means even though there are threads, they don't execute concurrently. Too bad if your server has several processors / cores.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Python has the Global Interpreter Lock, which means even though there are threads, they don't execute concurrently. Too bad if your server has several processors / cores.
Love Python; hate GIL. Trust me, I know exactly what you mean.
That said, there are quite a few [python.org] multi-processing packages for Python (disclaimer: two of the ones under SMP are mine, so I'm kind of biased toward the idea). Also, Python 2.6 will ship with a standard multiprocessing module [python.org] that's very similar to it's multithreading counterpart and should be an easy migration.
Multithreading is cool, but there are other ways to skin that cat.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and another thing: I think he meant that in the situations where Python is too slow, Java would probably also be too slow. Those cases call for embedded C or other low-level optimization. I don't think he meant to say that Python is faster than Java.
Java is the most used language (Score:4, Insightful)
W(h)ither Programming Languages? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, depending on who you talk to...
(C | C++ | Java) is the ultimate programming language.
Now we're being told that compiled languages are passe' and all you need is
(Perl | Python | AJAX).
In the meantime, the -art- and -science- of programming language design seems to have withered away due to lack of interest from the developer community.
From what I've seen over the last 30 years:
1. Programing Languages -DO- make a difference in both individual productivity and organizational effectiveness. And the latter is -much more important- than the former for anything bigger than a breadbox.
2. Management doesn't believe #1. In fact, management doesn't believe in software engineering. Instead, management wants to throw bodies at problems to make impossible schedules, with little concern for quality of the product. At best, managers throw process (and SEI CMM/CMM-I) at the hoards of programmers, believing that process is a substitute for
(a) developer talent
(b) product quality
So I guess ( 1 & 2) together explain the demise of programming language design. And all we can pray for is increases in second-order tools such as debuggers and, if we're really good, tools like static analyzers, to make up for the sh*tty set of current (popular) programming languages. And as end users, bugs and security holes will continue to be chronic results...
dave
Re:W(h)ither Programming Languages? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got two major problems with your post.
1) You list AJAX along with Pearl and Python in a list to be compared against C, C++ and Java. Here's a hint:
Pick the item from the list that doesn't belong:
C
C++
Java
Pearl
Python
AJAX
2) Er, shitty set of current (popular) programming languages? We have NEVER had such a choice in programming languages as we do now. There are a LOT of popular programming languages right now. C, C++, C#, VB, VB.Net, Pearl, Python, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Eiffel, Tcl for starters.
Care to go back 15 years and provide me with the list of better, popular languages at that time?
Don't think you're flaming, but I also don't think you have a clue as to what you're talking about.
Re:W(h)ither Programming Languages? (Score:5, Funny)
Pearl. All the other terms are correctly spelled?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I claim that Ada83 is better than C, Ada95 and Eiffel are better than C++ and Ada05 is better than Java or C#. But that's just my opinion.
What is very clear is that the design philosophies of Ada (focusing on 'programming in the large') or Eiffel (focusing on 'correctness by contract conformance') have been lost. Both languages, along with others (dating back to COBOL) is on readability over writeability. (Programs get read much more often than they get written.) Python in some respects is the e
never mattered (Score:5, Funny)
Incredibly complex (Score:5, Insightful)
First, as the Java platform has matured, it has become incredibly complex. Today it's possible to do anything with Java, but no one developer can do everything
What developer has to do everything? We use Java to run our systems without using all the complex frameworks that you seem to be referring to. It does the job. Just because people have developed over-engineered frameworks with a language doesn't detract from the the value of that language.
Java never mattered....? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books..."
Wow...that has to be one of the most idiotic statements I've ever read from one of you guys.
I'm no Java evangelist, but saying Java itself never mattered is like saying C (or even C++) never mattered - it just smacks of total ignorance.
Java has had a HUGE impact on software development, especially in the enterprise. I won't say it's all been great...but it's certainly made a difference in a lot of areas.
If the language really never matter, there would not be such a large community of developers using Java, and Microsoft would not have bothered to change their entire development platform to be so much like it (i.e. C#/CLR/.NET).
I'd thought you Slashdot guys were smarter than this. I guess I was wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Neither have you. The proper statement would be "you must be new here".
blarg (Score:3, Insightful)
java is like an old truck (Score:5, Interesting)
Java has its problems, but it's actually a great stable platform. I think people carp about Java's flaws because it is so popular, taking shots at the leader. In reality, Java is a huge and boring but effective ecosystem if you want to deliver a piece of software and have it just work.
It's not sexy, but jeez on linux, windows, and Mac, I've built java code and moved the .jars all all over the place, and darned if it doesn't do what it's supposed to, like an old truck that just works carts around all sorts of work.
With Java being open, we all benefit from its increased spread as an open and reliable platform -- like C. Depending on Java looked a more iffy when it was so tied to Sun. Your source code is such an expensive investment, you don't want to take weird risks (cough .net cough). With Java open ... well now it looks like a very safe, neutral choice.
You can write C code, and since it's open, you know your code would work all over. Java has a future that way too now.
C is still great for its niche, but (flame on) Java delivers 10x more capability in its libraries. C is a creature of the 1970's, so you don't get so much (I *love* C, but get a lot more done in Java). Also, the optimizations in HotSpot are awesome, making languages which run on the JVM look like the future. I hear if you want to see Java with the cruft stripped away, check out Scala.
Nice try Taco (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I know what you're doing - purposely trolling in order to incite a flamewar, driving up hits and thus ad impressions.
It won't work though; surely the vast majority of your readership browses with Firefox and some sort of adblocking system.
I mean it can't be that you genuinely believe that arguably the most often-used language for enterprise and commercial web development work "doesn't matter"; a 30 second search on any popular job website would dissuade you of that infantile notion.
Debian integration (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Debian. And with Java to be able to go into main it makes for even less hassle with Debian. Even if you don't use Java there are many programs written for it.
Seems to feed me pretty well... (Score:3, Interesting)
This should be obvious, but (Score:5, Informative)
To ask if Java were new we would use it today, while valid as an abstract and absolute measure, is irrelevant in today's software world context.
Java is HUGELY entrenched in today's business software market, probably even more so if one weights by overall company valuation (i.e. Java's market share by company valuation is substantial, perhaps even dominant).
Open sourcing it matters since Java's growth and maintenance matter, as the investment in Java is substantial and unlikely to change any time soon.
Java's never gonna be the hot young thing in programming again (if it ever was), but that's irrelevant to the question of open sourcing it. Java has substantial value, and open sourcing software of value matters. Doing things that alter the growth and maintenance plans of a heavily vested technology matter.
Further, this:
is a tautology. No developer can do everything with C++ either, that doesn't lessen its value or relevance. Neither does Java's complexity or unwieldiness lessen the value gained in being able to learn from and modify how it has implemented things.
I personally don't get this constant desire on some people's part to denigrate Java. Some sort of Comp Sci elitism for the business language?
Claiming open sourcing Java doesn't matter is like claiming open sourcing windows wouldn't matter; the same arguments apply. Windows is unwieldy and complex, and competing software generally does things better than windows.
Mod article down (Score:4, Insightful)
I made a hell of a lot more coding Java than writing books about it.
Slow news day, huh? What's next, what Lawrence Lessig had for lunch, followed by moral outrage over being charged cash money for a product or service?
Signed Java Applets = True Web Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
I program in Java because both for it's platform independence and for the fact that if you sign a Java applet and embed it in a web page you are pretty much able to do whatever a fully-fledged Java application could do, like access the full file system.
I know of no other platform that allows you to write true "web apps" that can rival the stand-alone ones.
Open Java and the VB6 Lesson (Score:3, Informative)
The bosses asked me my opinion on what we should do next. We didn't really have a solution to the enormous cost of rewriting everything, but we needed to decide on a new language to adopt. After being so horribly stung by Microsoft on VB I suggested that Java would be a safer direction to go in. C# and
After the VB saga, I am very dubious of using any language which is controlled by a company (particularly when it's Microsoft). Clearly Sun still has a lot of control, but now with Java being Open source, it won't matter so much if Sun dumps Java. We'll have the code after all.
P.S. Trying to upgrade component by component using interop was hell and not really a viable option.
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:4, Insightful)
It certainly seems to be a fairly easy introduction to OOP.
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:5, Interesting)
A "cludgey" app can be written in every language, Java is no exception.
Without getting in to a bunch of holy war things, here are some of the things that Slashdotters may like about Java:
1. You can get paid to write in it. A lot of us (myself included) are software developers who write stuff in primarily in Java. Sure, I know other languages like Ruby, but it's nowhere near as ubiquitous as Java. This makes employers like Java.
2. It's mature. It's been around for a long time, and the libraries are mostly stable and bug free. This is not true for some other languages. Also, the APIs for Java are huge and support everything, and the documentation is good.
3. It's fast(er). Older Java GUI stuff was not fast, and it gave people the impression that all of Java is not fast. Well, Java 1.6 is fast.
4. It's cross platform. This isn't a big deal for me so much, but it might be for some people.
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Struts 1.x is huge, but it isn't being used as much on new projects. Newer frameworks like Tapestry, Wicket, Struts 2/Webwork, and Spring are far easier to setup and use, more flexible, or both.
2. EJB2 was an overengineered mess. EJB3 is viewed as far superior, and many major sites aren't bothering with EJB at all.
3. A lot of Java tools like Hibernate have moved from checked exceptions (which must be caught or declared to be thrown in the method signature) to runtime exceptions (which do not need to be caught).
The language definitely has warts. But the common open source (and for that matter, commercial) tools are learning lessons in ease of setup and configuration from Ruby, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Zope, and so forth. (I used web applications as the example domain because that's what I know a little about. I understand similar enhancements are happening elsewhere.)
On the other hand, the language standard library is big enough and has enough corner cases that the learning curve is enormous.
Amen! (Score:3, Interesting)
You can get paid to write in it.
Can I get an amen?
It doesn't matter how super-zappo your favorite language is if it doesn't put food on the table. Your likes and dislikes don't figure into it when it comes to a job. See Maslow's hierarchy of needs for further clarification.
Go to Careerbuilder and look up Java jobs. And while you're there look up .NET (which is pretty much Microsoft's Java). The jobs run 60/40 in favor of .NET. But there's dozens of them. High paying, too.
I'm currently studying for my Java certification. Why
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything I have ever used that ran in java was horridly cludgey and just plain annoying to use. Insight please?
Technical point: if you really want insight, you're not a troll.
Hard to give you an insight, since you're obviously not a programmer: your criticism of Java is based on bad experience using Java programs, not creating them. It would be like explaining the fine points of carpentry to somebody who's never picked up a saw or hammer.
That said, most GUI Java programs are pretty awful, and those are the programs somebody like you is going to base your judgment on. It's a lot harder than it should be to write a
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we the /. crown love Sun/Java?
Many of us used Sun boxes at Uni (I did) then suffered IBM boxes (although SMIT was quite spiffy) in our jobs. Strangely we started to wish we had the old Sun boxes back. (Or is this just me?)
Many of us moved from C (and C++) to Java, see above.
We love Java because we know Java, it does everything, and if you've grown with it, then it's OK. Sure, coming to Java from cold today it seems really complex.
Is Java perfect? LOL! No, not even close. But Java is fun to program in. Java programs aren't wedded to any particular OS/Hardware combination (I'd admit they don't quite live up to the "write once/run everywhere" promise, but it's close enough). Java has proved amazingly adaptable - and speed isn't really as much of an issue as the haters claim, if it was we'd all write assembler. Java isn't really far off the speed of C++. As for no multiple inheritance - do you REALLY want that?! There is a reason pretty much every phone has Java on it (don't tell anyone - but I quite like playing Tetris on my phone, thanks Java).
As for Sun, well they do make some really nice boxes, and they are giving us some great stuff (DTrace anyone?)
You're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
No, seriously, you're wrong. Just because you don't see that Java is being used for a web site's back end doesn't mean you haven't been using it. Personally, I like Eclipse, but then I'm a programmer. I used to use Azureus, but since I'm mostly on a Mac, I started using Bits on Wheels. Not a crack against Azureus from a functional or usability standpoint, I just preferred the "wheel" in BoW. Totally arbitrary eye candy.
The problem with Applets was that AWT was a GUI framework built on top of a web browser, which is already a (wait for it...) GUI framework. The only reason Flash succeeded was because web browsers didn't have vector graphic support ten years ago.
As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone? There are more examples, but just for a moment wrap your head around the concept of what if Sun never released the specs to NFS. What would the BSDs and Linux use to map file shares? CIFS/SMB aka Samba?
So let's take a look at Win32 MFC. That was written in C/C++. So did that framework suck so much? Answer: good code can come from any language where the developer is sufficiently skilled. Bad code can come from any language despite any intrinsic qualities in that language.
Re:no, you're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
If there were better alternatives to NFS, why didn't people use them or create newer, better ones? With all the faults of NFS, I don't know of alternatives that magically make all of those problems go away. Locking on remote resources that you want to be performant is a hard problem. WebDAV certainly doesn't solve that problem. And speaking of WebDAV, how would that have solved the NFS problem when it hadn't even been invented yet? Nor had HTTP 1.1 for that matter. Nor had HTTP 1.0 for that matter. Nor had XML, which it uses for metadata.
Saying that WebDAV or AFS should have been used back in the heyday of NFS sounds like someone suggesting that DOS shouldn't have been used in 1981 because Linux would be created ten years later. You could certainly give other examples to replace DOS in '81 like CP/M, but the fact that you don't realize that NFS was first leads me to believe you are too young to remember what it was like. To give you an idea, an implementation of AFS was only released as open source in 2000 by IBM. Where were the alternatives before then?
Answer: there weren't any good ones. And speaking of Samba, unlike CIFS/SMB, the NFS docs that Sun released actually matched up well with the protocol unlike what Microsoft released and Samba reverse engineered.
FYI: "NFS v4 (RFC 3010, December 2000; revised in RFC 3530, April 2003), influenced by AFS and CIFS, includes performance improvements, mandates strong security, and introduces a stateful protocol. Version 4 became the first version developed with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) after Sun Microsystems handed over the development of the NFS protocols." - Wikipedia
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Javascript has a better object model?
You mean, a language without a basic stuff like namespaces (!!) has a better object model than Java?
Oh, and Java also has static typing. That's a great feature.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Javascript's object model is simpler, more flexible, and more consistant than Java's object model. Whether it's better depends on your point of view, but it has some advantages.
Static typing is nice when done properly, but Java doesn't do it properly. It manages to be both inflexible and restrictive, and prevents only relatively uncommon errors. I can't think of a single statically-typed language that has a worse type system than Java.
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:5, Interesting)
So you better have to explain yourself what's really wrong with the type handling in Java. Maybe you program in some more obscure language?
Re:(Troll) I hate java, why does /. love it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you find Java's static typing inflexible and restrictive, you're doing it wrong. The great advantage I find with the level of restriction that Java puts on your types is that it enables brilliant development tools. Refactoring support is paramount.
Having recently completed a major refactoring of a Ruby project with tens of thousands of lines of code, I can say from experience that refactoring of an app written in a dynamic language can be a colossal pain in the ass. Just finding everywhere that a particular class is being used can take hours or days. With a decent refactoring IDE and a Java 5/6 (with everything generified) such an operation takes a couple of seconds at most.
Re:Programmers opinions on the language? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have written a few applications in Java.
I actually like it. If you want to write a database driven application that is also multi threaded I think it is just great.
If you need to be multi-platform it is the best solution that I have found. QT is close also.
The speed argument is old and should be tossed. Swing isn't slow or nasty anymore and is pretty speedy. SWT is also pretty nice.
Try Jedit, Netbeans, or Eclipse to see what a nice java application can feel like.
If you haven't used the latest version of Java I suggest you try it.
I have even found good uses for java appletts. Yes I know they got a bad name because way to many idiots "Microsoft I am looking right at you" used them for stupid things like hover buttons.
Java is a a good free as in beer and free now free as in GPL RAD system.
As far as it not mattering? Well a lot of people make a living writing Java. I just saw a Story on slashdot about a guy running java on a Cluster to do modeling.
As far as Java being to big for anybody to use it for anything practical...
Well JEdit, Netbeans, Eclipse, OpenOffice, and thousands of cell phone programs all say BALONEY.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I would guess that most apps written in Java that you've used have been quite responsive, but you weren't aware that you were using a Java app. This is because most Java apps that people use are server-side apps (eBay springs immediately to mind).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, obviously, because everyone I know, including myself, has only ever had dev jobs using Java.
Er, not.
That's just stupid. Likely you've been working with Java in your experience, but I know tons of people that have never touched it at their place of work, including myself.
Further, at this point, it doesn't matter that I don't 'know' Java. I do 'know' half a dozen languages and if I should ever come across a job that I can't get _because_ I don't 'know' Java, then I've simply vetted a company that I know
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You need to know Java...Corporate IT are basically only interested in hiring Java developers.
That's exactly what I thought 3 years ago when I applied for my current job. I had studied up on my java, bought various books to hone my skills (java is one of my weaker languages), tested my knowledge with free online tests, considered becoming a "Sun Certified Java Developer", etc, etc.
Then I interviewed.
They hired me with a salary that was 27% more than what I had been asking. But not to program in Java. They
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? I've been programming for corporate IT for 13+ years and I've only played with Java. I've never required it before interviewing other programmers, either.
Thus, you have never needed Java. However, for developers who are new to the industry, it is difficult to avoid Java.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why would you aim for 1/3 of the market when you can aim for 2/3?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=java+developers%2C+.Net+developers&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 [google.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you aim for 1/3 of the market when you can aim for 2/3?
Because, on average, I enjoy my job a lot more when I'm doing .NET work. I tend to spend a lot less time dicking around with XML files and the environment, a lot less time fighting my IDE (disclaimer, my recent experience is mostly with Eclipse and I expect the alternatives would be better, for me) and a lot more time writing code that solves the problem at hand. I understand that not everyone will have the same preferences or experience, bu