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The "Return" of Java Discussed

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the off-again-on-again-languages dept.

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?"

4 of 558 comments (clear)

  1. Return of Java by LizardKing · · 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:

    • A large part of the readership are students, and therefore don't really know what's going on in the software industry.
    • The prepondereance of GNU fanboys means that Java gets dissed for not being Free(tm).

    Discuss ...

  2. Request for interview by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  3. Re:There has been some good alternatives by redsolo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Im amazed that MS (or other firms) have managed to let these rumors become facts. Java is not slow, at my last job we created an image viewer for professional photographers which was running on Java. The system had no problem showing 2000 thumbs (not at the same time, but scrolling was instant), zooming into 10mbs images was a breeze, you could play with the mouse buttons and it would instantly zoom to the 1:1 layer and back again. And this is something that Java has been known to be very bad with GUI and images. But we managed to pull it of anyway, and it was even quicker than the defacto industry standard application, which was written in C++.

    So, please dont come with those crap arguments, because they are not true.

    But what is true; c++ will always be faster than java, .Net might be (but thats because of the infamous shortcuts than only MS ppl know of). But is that the really point, when you are creating desktop applications? If you want speed, try develop a desktop app in Assembler. Now it will be the fastest around, but probably look like crap.

    What must be really annoying, is that .NET has borrowed so many classes from Java so they should call it J--.

  4. Re:And for anybody who doesn't believe... by sbrown123 · · 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.