Phillip Greenspun: Java == SUV

lateralus writes "In his blog, Philip Greenspun re tells of his epiphany that Java is the SUV of programming languages. An interesting point brought forth in his typical extreme style."

Comments

Re:JAVA is the suv?

[Twylite]

I've got to agree with this. Reading Greenspun's blog I was left pondering how to start responding to something so completely wrong.

The article implies a lack of understanding of the JSP paradigm. Sure, binding variables to a relational database is tough. So if you insist on doing that, use JSP tags. But that's not the point of Java -- you should be access instance methods from a JSP page, and those instances can access any data source they choose.

VB and ASP are intended for developing front-ends to primarily relational data, so they make it pretty easy to accomplish. The fact that they make it easy doesn't mean that you can use the same design and technique to deliver a scalable, maintainable web site. All the current theory says take the pain up front and put in a decent template system, and never put code in your page.

"People who are serious about getting the job done on time and under budget" will get the requirements first, and not making sweeping bullshit generalisations. There is a huge problem in the industry at the moment with IS departments trying to coalesce the functionality of dozens of specific-purpose VB applications into one enterprise system. The size of the project, requirement for scalability, expected lifetime and regularity of changes, systems integration issues, cost, stability, customer technology preference and other technical and non-technical issues will all influence the choice of a development environment.

With a dynamic language ... you could do bind variables by having the database interface look at local variables in the caller's environment

And if you look at development guides and bug reports, you'll find that it is exactly this sort of implementation that has insidious security holes. The security of systems that provide such shortcut functionality depends on the developer understanding how to use the system properly. Unfortunately it is quite often developers who don't have the time or inclination to understand that use these shortcuts.

With Web applications, nearly all of the engineering happens in the SQL database and the interaction design, which is embedded in the page flow links. None of the extra power of Java is useful when the source of persistence is a relational database management system such as Oracle or SQL Server

Greenspun seems to believe all "web applications" are Internet (rather than Intranet) applications. Beyond management systems (CMS and document management) I have seem few significant intranet systems that are merely a web interface to a database. Many intranet web applications interface to accounting, stock, POS, banking, quotation and other systems, where integration cannot be accomplished using a database. A Gung Ho "do it all in the web page because its fastest" approach is the quickest route to failure.

So ASP and PHP have their place, and they're almost certainly easier to understand for a CS senior who isn't interested in reading up on the design principles behind JSP ... but that doesn't make them better.

JSP type 1 applications

[tgreiner]

What this guy describes is called a JSP "type 1" application. It (ab-)uses the JSP's ability to embed Java code directly into the JSP page (which is typical for languages like PHP). Doing this is a BAD idea.

You will typically

• use Java beans or some other utiliy classes to encapsulate data base or business logic access (type 2)
  
• use a Java tag library like Jakarta struts to provide you with an application framework and common used tags (logic tags, bean access etc.) (type 3)
  

I tend to agree with his problems with JDBC being quite cumbersome to use. This is why one will typically use data access Java beans which encapsulate data access. Also there are several object-relational mapping frameworks (e.g. CastorJDO) which will even isolate you from SQL and database details completely.

I would even tend to agree with him on terms of how quickly one can hack some web application. One will be faster with a scripting language like PHP, but when it comes to extending/maintaining a JSP type 2/3 application will win.

Re:Finally

[Bob9113]

OK, it's just a joke, but I'm interested in countering one point that some people still believe.

It's cross-platform feature has been tainted by the agenda of the forces that dominate the respective operating system

I am currently employed on a project with roughly one megaLOC of Java. It has a Swing GUI, EJB middle tier, and Oracle at the back. It currently runs on Windows, several flavors of Linux, and Solaris, without recompile. I do the production builds on a Linux machine and we distribute them to roughly 2000 Windows and a few dozen Linux workstations. Likewise I do the production middle tier on Linux and deploy to Solaris, and the development and testing versions of the middle tier go to Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

Would it fit on a wristwatch? No, it's too big. Would it run on BeOS or Mac? You betcha.

Greenspun somewhat misguided

[flakac]

I develop regularly in C/C++ (Unix and Windows), Java (J2EE), and PHP, and can't really agree with the author's contentions. J2EE is much superior to PHP for serious web applications -- the students mentioned in the article would have been much happier using WebLogic or jBoss instead of than Oracle.

Of the three, C/C++ is obviously not well suited for developing web-based applications.

PHP is quick and easy, but it suffers from a lack of vision -- it was never designed, and the authors don't really seem to know what they want to do or where they want to go with it (don't even get me started on how it's supposed to be "Object-oriented" now...). IMO, it's much easier to make a mistake in PHP, and code is much less maintainable than equivalent JSP pages -- just try switching from MySQL to Oracle, and you'll see what I mean. I shudder whenever I hear the words PHP and enterprise in the same sentence.

Re:Look what it's competeing against.

[mobiGeek]

... but Php and Java aren't even the same kind of programming language

Agreed.

Java can be used to create all the same types of apps that C can

Well...no. C is used for system development (i.e. hardware banging). Java cannot be used in that environment without direct support of the libraries and the JVM (or by JNI calls to libraries written in C/C++).

...though C cannot be used in all the apps Java can (i.e Web.)

Well...no. C can be used anywhere that Java can be. On the server side, most servers (including web and proxy servers) are written in C. There's nothing stopping people from writing "app servers" in C...in fact there may even be a few of those too.

On the client side, "applets" are not a valid use of Java. Applets was a marketing ploy that grew wildly out of hand. Besides, there are ActiveX controls written in C/C++ that perform the same basic functionality of applets.

One thing that Java has over C/C++ is its cross-platform capabilities. With C, if you want cross-platform you have to work to code it that way. With Java, if you want to break cross-platform, you have to work to code it that way (use non-standard libs, use JNI, etc...)

As for perl, the fact that it has to be compiled every time it is run kinds of takes away from any speed advantage over Java.

Yes and no. Perl is slower to start up than a C/C++ native application of similar functionality. Java too is very slow to start up (usually *much* slower than Perl for very small scripts).

However, long running apps written in Perl and Java both perform very well when compared to similar C/C++. By long-running, I mean "long enough that the startup time becomes a wash". I've written web crawlers in Perl and Java that run for weeks at a time. Comparing their performance to existing crawlers written in C/C++, the performances are equivalent (though the Java and Perl bots suck up more memory).

Development time for those bots was significantly less in Java and Perl than for equivalent C-based bots. (BTW: the Perl bots were written back before LWP was stable/available)

The only language in common use that does everything Java does is fricking Visual Basic

Well...no. VB is stuck on one platform (well, two if you consider MS-Java...though VB.NET is NOT VB).