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How Much Java in the Linux World?
jg21 writes "Java is 'incredibly heavily used' in the Linux community, according to Sun's James Gosling, one of Java's co-creators. Gosling was debating Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf, IBM's Rod Smith, and others at JavaOne this week about the possible merits of open-sourcing Java vs the market's demand for continuing compatibility. But Behlendorf seemed not to agree. So who was right, how many Slashdotters are also Java users? Is "incredibly heavily used" an overstatement by Gosling, who after all helped create the language and therefore might be biased?"
Afaik the most heavily used language is C/C++ and not java. Although its used in openoffice and jedit, no other java programs I use regularly spring to mind (unless they're masquerading as something else). C/C++ ar ehte most heavily used, not java, since its used for the kernel and all the 'base' programs
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
Might try Java if the Mono JVM works well, but seems Novell's focus is on C# first.
You don't want to step on Sun's toes by using the name "Java" in naming something you made with it, like "Java Invaders".
Hi,
my team is in charge of the technological foundations for all the Internet related apps pushed by our employer. Linux / Apache / Tomcat is used EVERYWHERE for all our online banking and trading systems.
Access to the legacy system is also done in Java.
I also clearly think we're not alone doing so.
I work for a company that produces a J2EE application server and J2EE web applicatons, so I'm pretty much exclusively Java and exclusively Linux. I've been using Java on Linux for work for the last five years.
Organizations building web applications will pick a technology (Java, PHP, Perl, etc.) and then the OS to support it. No one in their right mind picks the OS then the web technology. That's just nuts.
Wal-Mart for example went with Java and Linux for their website in their early history. It's on Java and Solaris x86 today. Now what is it about Solaris x86 that could convince a cost-conscious organization like Wal-Mart to make the switch?
With Java development, the OS is completely marginalized. The question is which OS is the operation group in the organizations in question willing to support.
Well I guess I use Java apps a lot. I am forced to use windows for some applications so to feel at home I tend to search for cross platform programs when I need some thing. These tend to be Java based. I then install them in Linux and windows and it all works out. I would say that 3/4th of my every day programs that I use are Java. Though that could just be me. :P
I ate your fish.
While I do cross-platform C/C++ development as well, when I need to make sure it's cross platform, I use Java.
Portable, standardized language and interfaces are what gives Java it's power. The community process has provided a reasonable pace of new feature integration, and has abandoned a few implementations that weren't really "ready", much as an orphaned code fork would be.
Open sourcing Java would be a mistake. Unless protected by a strong consortium of members (JCP) or by a strong backer who refuses to sell out to any one interest (M$ platform-specific extensions), Java would rapidly fragment into several code forks and become essentially useless.
It may take time to get features in through the JCP, but it also ensures there are no hastily implemented hacks making their way into the system. Quite frankly, the vast majority of OSS projects which don't come from Linus, Apache, Mozilla, or IBM have proven to be an absolutely disgusting mess of poorly and un-documented code. Java's embedded documentation is an elegant solution to the problem of keeping API manuals and source in sync, but it seems most OSS developers still haven't evolved past the "what, you can't read code?" mentality of the teenage "l33t" programming snob.
OSS means no sanity checks on feature creep, portability verification, documentation verification, regression testing, and all the other enterprise-project aspects of development that make it a useful technology. I've lost track of the number of times I've encountered platform-specific hacks in OSS code that weren't properly #ifdef-bracketed, or which just completely incompatible with other O/S implementations.
In short, Java is critical because it is portable and managed. The fact that Linux is supported is important from a rollout standpoint, but the underlying OS is (and should remain) irrelevant.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I wonder if all the sane people think that Java, SPF, XML, SOAP, UUDI, Aspect Oriented Programming, Six Sigma, CMM are all hype and a gigantic waste of time and money?
I should start a web site where we can light torches and realize that there is a silent majority of same people tolerating this crap because we don't realize that we can force change.
I have a dream...
We shall overcome!
I use Java on all four of my main platforms: OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. I tend to use it for projects that are larger than I would feel comfortable doing in Perl. An added benefit is they are cross-platform, just like Perl.
I started using Java in 1997 on Windows, and it followed me when I expanded into different operating systems.
I really like C, and use it for some work-related and recreational programming, but when the "rubber meets the road" and I need to get something done within a short time frame, I turn to Perl and Java. Perl, mostly for data parsing jobs, and Java for the more "permanent" programs, especially for graphical network clients.
I've been using Java JRE's since 1.02, and they have really grown in power and speed over the years. I have no problems using Swing apps on my 800 MHz iMac or my 1.7 GHz Celeron Linux system. They even run very well on my 533 MHz Celeron running Windows 2000. While they may not have the raw speed of a native app written in C or C++ (especially graphical apps), the performance I get is more than adequate for the job being performed.
No matter where you go... there you are.
Gosling is right in that many people that don't want to work with Windows but want to make a living developing software embrace Java because it gives them the opportunity to work in their favourite environment - Linux. That is at least true for myself. I consider myself in the Linux fold, like Gosling says, and I develop Java. Having said that, there are very few client side java applications I use, but for server side stuff and web applications, Java is great.
It seems that every time Linux is discussed on Slashdot, everything revolves around KDE, Gnome, office suites or editors...
The volume of Java use on Linux can be judged by taking a look at the operating systems that Sun directly provides Java VMs for: Solaris, Windows and Linux. This has been going on for years, even before Sun's recent 'conversion' to Linux use. This was because of demand from Linux developers. It makes sense: Most server-side coding is now done in Java, and the fastest growing server operating system is Linux.
I regularly use the LDAP Browser, which is written in Java, since it's the best free LDAP browser/editor I know of.
I do the opposite. I write in a mixture of Java and native code that only runs on Windows. It could theoretically be ported to Linux, but I haven't done it yet.
.NET or mono if I was starting now, but I have a load of reusable code I don't want to have to port), and (2) I need to use native APIs to achieve the effets I want to. Java's OS interface just wasn't up to the job.
I do this because (1) I like working in an object-oriented, garbage-collected, runtime-typed language, and Java was the most convenient for me when I started all this (I'd probably use C# & either
Doing this has given me a pretty unique insight into Java's shortcomings. It's this: AWT. The system is an abomination.
And before you say "Swing!", anything that is built as a layer on top of AWT is doomed from the start, in my opinion. AWT is badly designed and inefficiently implemented, and nothing can save it IMO.
At my company, we started building a new product on RH9 using Sun's
JDK 1.4.2. This worked fine through development and functional
testing. But once we started doing stress testing and scalability
testing, things got difficult.
First we hit the infamous LD_ASSUME_KERNEL problem. The JVM would
freeze up mysteriously on innocuous statements such as "count =
0". This happened in synchronized method, and the more threads there
were, the more frequently we'd hit this problem.
Then we discovered that the Sun JDKs management of memory in
conjunction with nio classes was not so good. Memory usage as reported
by Java was fine, no leaks, and then all of a sudden we'd die with an
OutOfMemoryError.
IBMs implementation seems to be of higher quality on Linux, and that's
what we're now using.
Having gone through all this, I'm still glad that we're on Java. It's
a very nice language, performance is more than adequate (for our
application anyway), the libraries are excellent, the tools are
excellent, and I'm happy not to be dealing with memory corruption
issues.
Enlightened script languages, I would say.
Technically, you're wrong; they're byte-compiled (except maybe tcl). But I understand what you mean. But so what? They're pretty damn enlightened! Check out, e.g., Zope before you sneer at python.
All this extra code allows the programs to be clearer, better organized.
By that logic, assembly language programs must be the clearest and best organized programs of all.
> people who usually don't have a clue what else is out there.
Maybe you?
Well, in nearly 25 years as a professional software developer, I have used (off the top of my head) assembler, basic, C, C++, forth, java, lisp, pascal, perl, python, shell and tcl, and dabbled in ADA, APL, eiffel, prolog, ruby, smalltalk, snobol and more. The biggest gap in my education is probably the functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. I think I have at least a bit of an idea what's out there. How 'bout you?
about the possible merits of open-sourcing Java vs the market's demand for continuing compatibility
...), several incompatible 3D APIs, incompatible and incomplete implementations (Sun's, gcj, etc.), several incompatible levels (J2SE, J2ME, J2EE, ...), and on and on. Even among Java implementations based on Sun's code, there are wild incompatibilities. C# and Mono are futher incompatible branches off the Java tree. Open sourcing Java could have reduced those incompatibilities because people wouldn't have had to reinvent the wheel just in order to get around Sun's licensing restrictions; something like Swing, for example, would have died its well-deserved death early on, instead of being kept alive artificially by Sun.
That phrasing suggests that open sourcing would have threatened compatibility, but the exact opposite would have been the case: under Sun's processes, Java has fallen apart: several different toolkits (AWT, Swing, SWT,
Of course, why any of this is worth worrying about anymore, I don't understand. Java has failed on all its promises: its promise to become a platform-independent way of delivering applications via the Internet, its promise of becoming a universal client development language, and even its promise of becoming a good server-side development language. Java hangs on in education, but as Pascal shows, that doesn't mean much. And some big corporations with too much money still try to use Java for "enterprise systems", but you can sell those guys anything.
Most linux boxes today are working as web/application servers.
Most enterprise apps these days are being written entirely in java/jsp and using web services. The only notable exception to this is the microsoft small business market which uses stuff like IIS/ASP.
So yeah, java on linux makes perfect sense in the business programming world, although not in the way most linux geeks think of programming (desktop).
You get 90% of the prettyness of a windows app, lower memory and cpu requirements, no deployment costs, no upgrade costs beyond developing the upgrade and both the platform and the language are free. Obviously, using something like websphere costs money, but that is optional.
First of all, I was programming in C and assembly language in the early 90's. Portability was a friggin nightmare. The idea of just taking a chunk of source code and plopping it into another compiler/assembler worked well in theory, but reality was a different story. The java system is such that one *CAN* take the same source code, plunk it down onto a completly different machine, architecture and OS and achieve the same functionality and results (within reason of course).
The ability to code on one platform and run your application on anything that there exists a java interpreter for is a wonderful thing. Especially with the upcoming Exodus from the Windows platform to Linux, there will be a big opportunity for java to close the gap on cross-platform solutions.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I've been programming heavily in C++ for many years. While I have a love hate relationship with C++'s complexity, I never thought that I would use Java heavily. But I've been working on more web services applications that access a database. The huge class library that is available with Java is a great advantage when it comes to developing these applications. Sure I can pay thousands of dollars to Rogue Wave and get some of the same features in C++ that I get for free using the Sun and Apache Java libraries. But why? The higher performance of C++ is of little use to most applications that references a database, since these applications are usually bottlenecked in the database. And when it comes to web services (e.g., XML processing, servlets, dynamically generated web pages), C++ cannot compare to Java. And then there is garbage collection, which makes develoopment faster.
There are still applications that I would not write in Java. For example, compilers or other algorithmically intensive applications that are CPU bound. There are also times when I can simplify my code by using C++ features like operator overloading (see my wavelet packet transform algorithm for example). But these applications are now in such a minority in the work I'm doing that I worry that my C++ "chops" will get rusty.
I went to a talk by Stroustrup where he discussed C++ (some cool algorithms to support linear algebra computation), future developments and C+++ vs. Java. He promotes C++ as a systems programming language. For things like operating systems, virtual machines, hardware drivers and compilers. He trumpted C++ as the most widely used programming language. What does not seem to have occured to Stroustrup is that systems level applications, where C++ shines, are a small minority of the code programmers write. My view is that C++'s star is fading.
So yeah, I'd say Java is heavily used on Linux. At work I'm part of a group developing a distributed database application in Java (this runs on top of a relational database, so Java's performance is not an issue), hosted on Linux. I'm in the process of setting up a Linux/PostgreSQL system on which to develop a financial trading application, again in Java, using XML and web services.