The Future of Java?

Todd AvErth writes "Judge Motz recently ordered Microsoft to distribute Sun's JVM with every Windows product. Salon decided to pipe up about it with an editorial musing about whether or not it's too late. Most of it isn't all that interesting, but some of the comments from Ximian developer, Miguel de Icaza point to the advantage of being able to compile from multiple languages. Anyone know of any projects to compile JVM bytecode from other languages?" Update: 01/23 16:00 GMT by M : Comments were disallowed when this story was originally posted; fixed now. My mistake (although KDE3's stupid mouseover-activates-form-elements user interface, now finally fixed in the latest versions, has to take some blame too).

Comments

Java Stays Alive Despite MS

[Spencerian]

It's never been too late for Java, any more than its too late for other less popular but powerful languages. Just because Perl is around doesn't make TK, or AppleScript, or Python any less useful, for instance.

I've found that Java is great for complex applications that need cross-platform ability when programmers can't spend too much time in making that compatibility happen. Mac OS X is among the strongest Java clients around, and it shows every time I download a raw JAR and just use it. YMMV, but Java has a lot of warmth left in its cup, and, if other platforms aside from MS continue to support, we'll all get free refills.

(Sorry for the many metaphors. Haven't had my cup of coffee this morning--ack, I did it again...)

Universities

[SnAzBaZ]

I think Java's future can only get better, not because of the recent ruling against Microsoft - which to be honest I don't think is all that important. Rather, the fact that all the universities (at least over here in the UK) seem to be adopting Java as their main language for Computer Science and related courses. It won't be long before a whole generation of enthusiastic Java coders emerges.

Another issue is that as linux becomes more widely used, code that can easily be run on multiple os's becomes far more valuable. And developers may turn to Java for this reason, especially with all the cheap, fast, hardware we're all running nowadays where speed and efficiency arn't as important as they used to be in many situations.

The client doesn't control the Future of Java

[jeremy_a]

I think people make a bigger deal of MS shipping Java than they should. Java on the client has been in pretty sad shape for a long time, yet Java's popularity has grown. It's used a lot for server-side applications, and apparently in embedded applications as well (although I'm not as familiar with that side of things). Whether or not MS ships a decent JVM on Windows doesn't change this -- Java will continue to be used just as it is today.

Does it make a difference for Java on the client? Maybe. Although most of my Java work has been on the server side of things, I have written a couple of Java client apps as well. But those were for use inside the intranet, so it wasn't a big deal to require users to install a JVM. It certainly won't solve all of Java's client-side problems. Performance is much less of a problem than it was in the early JVMs, but most Java clients are still slower than their native counterparts. Perhaps more importantly, there are quite a few bugs in the GUI libraries (both Swing and AWT) that make it difficult to write highly polished applications. And with Swing you get problems with the look-and-feel not matching the native platform, which is a problem for some. But I think that part of the reason why these are still problems is because Java on the client hasn't really taken off -- maybe more of these issues will get solved if people start looking at Java as a valid client platform (because MS is shipping it with Windows) and start writing more client apps.

But regardless of whether it makes a difference, I think the ruling does make sense. MS had a contract to provide a compatible JVM, and they didn't hold up their end of the contract. (At least that's my understanding -- I don't know the complete details of the contract.) Therefore they should have to make ammends -- maybe it is too late to "save Java" on the client, but it shouldn't hurt.

Java is the new COBOL

[The Famous Brett Wat]

Slightly off-topic, but I'm in the process of perusing the job ads again, and based on the proliferation of J2EE/EJB and other Java stuff I'm seeing, I think that Java is the new COBOL. Not that the languages bear any similarity whatsoever, but Java seems to have found a niche as the new lingua franca of business apps. It has competition, to be sure, but based on the history of COBOL, I would be so bold as to put my pundit hat on and say, "Java programming will be a safe bet for long-term employment in the computing industry." The jobs aren't necessarily all that interesting, but they look a whole lot more secure than the bleeding edge tech jobs which come and go in a flash.

The whole C# and .Net thing is a potential competitor in the same arena, but I don't think that Microsoft's inclusion (or not) of Java is going to matter much. I always figured that Java was intended to allow cross-platform desktop app programming, but the niche it seems to be filling is a back-end role. Personally, I had expected Perl to fill this role as the new COBOL, but demand for Perl seems to be way down, except as one of those "we also expect you to know Perl" type things, which never actually turns out to be important in the job.

Re:Languages for the Java VM...

[malachid69]

I own two. I have the TINI board (www.ibutton.com) and the PTSC chip (www.ptsc.com).

Also, it is very common on handhelds and cell phones. My Handspring has Sun's JDK and IBM's JDK on it, as well as Java3D.

Personally, I am still debating making my own PDA using an open-core java chip and OLED touchscreen.

Malachi