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The "Return" of Java Discussed
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?"
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:
Discuss ...
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.
Java now has an astounding array of libraries to use these days. Look at for some good ones.
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Not that it really matters, but this is one of the most stupid comparisons ever. The .NET search pulls back just about every site with a .net extension. Out of the first 10 pages, only one seems to be directly related to the .NET framework (the 4th entry is php.net! ), whereas all of the first 10 Java searches is relevant.
But how many companies do you see requiruing wxWidgets experience? Not to knock it as a cross platform development toolkit, but rightly or wrongly it's overlooked by virtually every company I've ever worked at. The exception is my current employer, where it was evaluate along with Qt and Java as a means to write cross platform GUIs. Java won, as C++ proved far too troublesome on a previous project.
.NET is actually a back handed compliment to Java. Java was so good that MicroSoft had to clone it. With Mono now at version 1.0, then perhaps C# is in a position to threaten Javas cross platform crown, although perhaps not without Windows Forms support.
Seriously, this was a 100% fluff article. The foundation for the article was based entirely on the assertion that a Google for "Java" brought back far fewer hits than "NET": well no shit Sherlock- perhaps if you'd tried ".NET" instead?
The major problem Java has is EJBs: everyone in Java-land seems to think that their problem requires solving using this pile of crap. A web application with persistence- ooh we'd better use EJBs then!
A secondary issue for Java is the barrier to entry is extremely high: sure you can learn the language quickly but it's Java's libraries that add the real value. And there are an awful lot of them. I've been using Java for 10 years (yeah I developed using the AWT and cursed it every day: if it hadn't been for the AWT being so awful I'd never have thought Swing was any good). Anyway, I've been using Java for 10 years and I would hate to have to learn it from scratch today.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
One of the first things I was taught in college, was to be critic of the sources I based research on.
In the world of WWW, it seems that each and every article and blog entry can be used as reliable fact. "He wrote it, it must be true". If some nerd posts that language X is the best, and those who use it are really really smart (case in point Paul Graham/Pythong) - that really doesn't make it come true. Same goes for Java "dead or alive" etc. etc. (Naturally, we all know that BSD is in fact dying - this is the exception).
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
For quite a while, when Sun was mentioned here, it was often in the context of "they're dying, no new research, no future, no idea of how to compete with Linux", and things like that. I think the height of that was this article, which actually talks about who caused "the fall of Sun".
Now in the last two weeks, we see a steady flow of Sun-related articles. Java is being promoted (this article, and this two weeks back), there is news on Solaris ("Linux apps on Solaris", "Solaris coming to Power architecture"), there have been bits about their cool Sun Rays on Linux, their R&D with the chips without connectors, and rumours that they could buy a key player, Novell. There's also Looking Glass.
All in 11 days or so. It seems someone is screaming "Hey Slashdot, we're really alive!". You'd almost expect them to sue SCO next week just for the attention...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Yawn. The 'Java is slow, obese and heavy' arguments are poor, out of date and largely inaccurate. Java's popularity on mobile phones suggests it is hardly a performance bottleneck, nor is it too demanding for memory.
When Java first came out, a large number of 'web hackers' and inexperienced programmers flocked to the language and produced applications that were often very weak. The easy access to such a flexible toolkit encouraged first time coders to undertake projects beyond their skills. Even experienced teams of developers found it took a while to get to grips with the issues involved in the new environment. The result was the inevitable disillusionment following the hype. Expect C# to go through a similar slump as people realise it doesn't solve all your problems.
However, Sun have done a stunning job in evolving Java, and developers who have taken the time to understand it have been producing impressive software for some time now. The latest version is powerful, fast and addresses an enormous range of requirements that make developing software very much more efficient.
There will be a lot more about Java in the news this year. Tools are being developed for everything from screensavers to MMORPGs, so why not take a second look before rehashing old predjudices?
java applications are difficult to install - many users do not already have a copy of the java virtual machine installed on their machine. For these users, installing a java application means downloading and installing the java runtime, which is quite large and can be difficult to configure.
Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.
java applications start up slowly - even the smallest java applications can take several seconds to start up, since the virtual machine needs to be loaded first.
I run Java on very low spec embedded PC's, and it's no slouch there. Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.
java applications have slow, unresponsive user interfaces--- on slower machines, using java-based user interfaces can be frustrating (resizing the application window can mean taking a coffee break).
That's strange, it must be their inability to code an interface and data models in an efficient manner. I write warehouse control software, where we are dealing with vasts amount of data that must be collated and displayed to the user. Very rarely do we have to resort to doing major grunt work on the server as opposed to doing it in the Java client.
java applications use a lot of memory - on most platforms, the virtual machine itself requires several MiB of memory, even for small applications that use very little memory. For more complicated applications, such as konspire2b, the virtual machine adds a lot of memory overhead. For example, kast currently uses about 1 MiB of memory when it's up and running. konspire 1.0 server (written using java) uses about 12 MiB. The interesting point is that konspire2b is far more complex that konspire 1.0 server (for example, the server portion of konspire 1.0 doesn't even have a user interface).
If this is really an issue for you, then you can tweak the runtimes environment. Yes, Java does requisition a lot of memeory when an untweaked JVM starts up, but the inmpact depends on the machine running the program.
java applications leak memory
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory". I have client-server Java applications that run 24x7 without leaking memory. Perhaps it's because I'm an unsually good Java programmer? Probably not, as I'm just an average one. What I don't do is immediately blame problems on the tools I use until I'm sure it isn't my lack of skill with the tools.
and thats not bad.
Consider, that java is not only the language itself, but also the whole environment!
And thats the real big difference to mono. Java may run on any Computer since 92' till 2050, without need to take care of what Microsoft will change in 2 years.
I'd win hands down. .NET
.COM
(386 000 000 results)
versus
(1940 000 000 results)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
He bases part of his argument that Java is less popular than .NET by doing a Google fight between "java" and "net"???
Java can be a coffee or an island in the Indonesia. Net is a device to ensnare animals and is a verb as well.
And he cites a blog item from a Sun executive as proof that Java is back? Please. The article is nonsensical.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Java language has stagnated in about 1999 with the release of J2SE 1.2 (dubbed Java 2)
.Java has become big enough to come in three different version, enterprise, standard and micro edition. The micro edition is extremely common in mobile phones, enterprise very common in banking etc.
Oh, what BS. Like that is the only thing that has changed
Some of the new things in Java 1.3:
Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), 20% faster RMI serialization, improvements in AWT/Swing/JavaSound, security enhancements, HotSpot optimization of client and server VMs.
In Java 1.4:
Secure Sockets and HTTPS, IPv6, cryptography extensions, LinkedHashMap, NIO (FileChannel, Non blocking IO), builtin regexp and logging (though there are even better open source libraries for those), assertions, XML processing, hardware acceleration of Java2D, image I/O framework, java Web start, Unicode 3.0 Support, Currency class, Accessibility improvements, Math improvments, Itanium support
In Java 1.5:
Generics, enhanced for Loop (for each), autoboxing/unboxing, typesafe enums, varargs, metadata annotations, class data sharing (improved VM startup time), launching apps under inetd in unix/linux, loads of security enhancements, Unicode 4 support, hyperbolic transcendental functions (sinh, cosh, tanh), cube root, base 10 logarithm, AMD Opteron support....
Sun is not letting MS win without a fight.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
No it won't. Server-side programming (i.e. "enterprise") means backwards compatability is very important. MSFT cannot afford to break it in .NET either.
.NET is years behind and plans to bring similar features only in 2007 (generics). It remains to be seen if they can do it without breaking backwards compatability. They already have a very hard time to convince their current developers to switch to .NET, they cannot afford to make their developers have to migrate once more in the next 10 years. .NET being so poorly designed I truely wonder if they can improve it without disturbing compatability. I cannot see it being a threat.
.NET would only be considered for fat client GUI's which used to be done in MFC. So even if .NET becomes a success, it will only replace parts that were already done in MSFT technology before, it has zero chance on the server side.
SUN has done an amazing job in extending Java even to include generics without breaking backwards compatability. Yes it did not lead to the solution that is technically and internally the most efficient (it would have required changes to the JVM), but the developer is not affected. Internally it is solved by typecasts, but who cares? The compiler, it cares and verifies and tat is what matters.
I work in a large company, and all new development is done 100% in Java (except the mainframe parts, in PL/1 but that is declining rapidly).
Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.
Everything is easy when you approach it from the point of view that it doesn't actually have to work.
There are many versions of the Java environment, from different vendors, all with subtly different behaviors and ways of integrating into the environment. Not to mention that the user may be running other Java applications which depend on a particular version of the Java environment, which further complicates matters. This makes it a pain if you want to deliver an application to the user with minimal hassle.
Or, you can just mandate that the user run such-and-such version of the Java enviroment on such-and-such platform, but then you lose a large part of the write-once, run-everywhere appeal.
I run Java on very low spec embedded PC's, and it's no slouch there. Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.
Java's "slowness" has at least three components: startup time, garbage collection delays, and the huge footprint which triggers swap activity.
For server applications, none of these matter much. For interactive client applications, these factors conspire to make Java apps look very bad when compared to "native" competitors. The exception here are applications like Eclipse, which you start when you get in from work and don't quit until you're done. But for most other apps, e.g. utility apps which you just want to quickly use and close, or workflows where you switch between multiple apps frequently, Java is just not suited.
Very rarely do we have to resort to doing major grunt work on the server as opposed to doing it in the Java client.
You're missing the point royally. Java isn't slow at doing grunt work. Few people would contest that. But as a platform to write desktop applications, it is a pig. The Swing UI is slow and prone to memory leaks, data interchange facilities are poor (even the clipboard functionality integrates poorly with the surrounding environment), memory requirements are completely uncontrollable.
Yes, Java does requisition a lot of memeory when an untweaked JVM starts up, but the inmpact depends on the machine running the program.
Indeed, and that's why most Java shops pretty much only run one application on their servers.
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory".
The fundamental problem is that you cannot control how memory gets used. For example: the JVM allocates memory from the underlying OS in chunks which it then doles out to your app as necessary. Then at garbage collection time, the memory is reclaimed from your app and returned to the JVM. But then the JVM may or may not ever return this memory to the underlying OS. This means that even if you have a tiny application, when the user opens a mammoth 100MB document just once, the application will continue using 100MB even after the user has closed the document.
Yes, this is sort of tunable through commandline options and other properties, but then only for some versions of some implementations of the JVM. Which brings us back to the first point, that it's a hassle to deliver hassle-free Java applications. It's so troublesome in fact that some programmers choose to simply distribute a JVM along with their apps.
The bottomline is this: Java is a cool language, but it just doesn't play nice with others. It insists on reinventing everything, it insists on abstracting everything, and it insists on total control over the environment. That's fine for in-house apps or web apps, but it limits Java's adoption on the desktop.
And ultimately, I think it condemns Java to a perpetual "behind the scenes" existance, growing ever more baroque appendages in its invisible niche, until its burdensome legacy is swept away by something more open.
I am almost at the point that I'll promise not to engage in this discussion again. Ok, one more time:
``Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.''
And a 20 MB download that takes dog knows how many megabytes after installation. Also, the whole process will have to be repeated at the next release, as chances are software developed on a newer version won't run on an older one.
``Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.''
Most applications don't need a lot of speed once up and running, anyway. Startup time is a huge annoyance, to me anyway. Is it really that hard to save the compiled code, so next time the JIT doesn't have to work again?
``java applications have slow, unresponsive user interfaces--- on slower machines, using java-based user interfaces can be frustrating (resizing the application window can mean taking a coffee break).
That's strange, it must be their inability to code an interface and data models in an efficient manner.''
I don't know about your systems, but on any system I have used in the past years, user interfaces in Java apps are noticeably more sluggish than in native ones. Perhaps this is perceived performance, but arguably it's the perceived performance that matters for user interfaces.
``java applications leak memory
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory".''
Yes, but isn't it symptomatic of defects in the language if many programs written in it leak memory? Besides, isn't Java's garbage collection supposed to take care of things? Personally, I believe that there was an issue with old JVMs (at least on Linux) leaking memory, that has now been solved. At any rate, I think that kast's author is being more bitter than rational when he says things might be better without gc. Gc is a Good Thing, after all, memory allocation and deallocation is excactly the sort of task that machines are good at and humans are not. It can even speed up programs under some circumstances.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I agree with what you write in general - that the article was unduly harsh / biased against Java. However, I differ on a few details ...
.NET frontend, and a large portion of end-users weren't interested in downloading the .NET framework (why this wasn't made part of XP or at least XP SP1 I don't know) and would quite happily write the program off as broken despite it having informed them they need to download the .NET framework for it to run.
.NET development I have no problems using 'just' 512 megs.
.NET. That said, .NET and its C# language _is_ a huge challenge for Java. I'm hoping that this competition will cause both languages to improve and thus benefit us developers. Java 1.5 (5.0) is a great start (incorporating many much needed features seen in .NET such as generics).
Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.
We're talking about the average Joe here. The average Joe just wants to double-click the installer for a program, click OK a couple of times, and have it work. I know from experience that such a requirement can be a great hinderance to adoption of a software application. I released a program with a
That's strange, it must be their inability to code an interface and data models in an efficient manner. I write warehouse control software, where we are dealing with vasts amount of data that must be collated and displayed to the user. Very rarely do we have to resort to doing major grunt work on the server as opposed to doing it in the Java client.
Swing _is_ rather unresponsive and slow unfortunately, due to it using no native widgets. This is solved by SWT, which mixes platform independence with use of native widgets where they exist. For this reason for example the popular Java IDE Eclipse (written with SWT) is much more responsive than Sun's IDE NetBeans. Swing in general is one of Java's major weaknesses (and its not 'excused' on the basis of platform independence) - not only in terms of speed but its layout managers for example are also a joke - and is the main reason why Java is used far far more for websites than application programs.
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory". I have client-server Java applications that run 24x7 without leaking memory.
I agree with you there, and would also add that 'very bad java programmers leak memory' while 'even pretty good C/C++ programmers leak memory. While one can leak memory in any language, Java does make it a lot easier to avoid. I have C++ programs where I've never found leaks despite a fair bit of work trying, yet I can't recall testing a single Java program for memory leaks (and I've written and tested a lot) and ever actually finding such a leak.
If this is really an issue for you, then you can tweak the runtimes environment. Yes, Java does requisition a lot of memeory when an untweaked JVM starts up, but the inmpact depends on the machine running the program.
Unfortunately for the average user with 'just' 256/512mb RAM on their machine, thrashing is almost an unavoidable consequence of using any non-trivial Java application. For development I find 1 gig RAM is a minimum for devloping with Java, whereas for
I might also add a thought relating to the actual editorial - comparing search results for 'NET' and 'Java' is hardly an accurate comparison, given that 'NET' is liable to find a lot more pages than just those relating to
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++.
.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.
.NET has borrowed so many classes from Java so they should call it J--.
So, please dont come with those crap arguments, because they are not true.
But what is true; c++ will always be faster than java,
What must be really annoying, is that
I never thought of Java as something worth following, because it was my personal experiece that: - it is slow - files are biiiiiig I mean, running some Java app makes the fan of my Powerbook spinning. Face it, only Photoshop and Imovie do that to me ...
... Sun (or Nokia, or whoever) has done a great job there.
But in Europe Java is really strong in the mobile phone environment. I have this SE 900 and it always draws lots of attention and things that strike me most are remarks of non-technical people, like the 16 (or something) year old girl at some fast food joint: "Does it have Java?" Even my sister (30, knows shit about computers) has it on her wishlist: a Java enabled mobile phone...
The fact alone that it is seen as some 'special' thing
One doesn't have to look far to find claims there that are simply wrong. For instance:
In particular, the last sentence is nonsense. Memory leaks, once identified, aren't typically hard to find in Java - and let's not forget that Java eliminates several types of memory related errors common in C/C++ programs altogether. Array overruns, wild pointers, multiple deallocations - all things of the past. Thankfully.Some of the other objections there will go away with JDK 1.5, others might best be addressed with ahead-of-time compilation (small utilities for instance). Regardless, Java is certainly improving over time.
All that said, of course, incompetent programmers will manage to screw up in any language they're given. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I find it amusing that Java is dying because it hasn't totally supplanted Win32 as a desktop application environment. More and more I'm seeing companies replacing their aging in-house applications with Java web services. Where several years ago an internal application might be a VB5 front-end to an Access database today is likely a full fledged web service running on a central server. Such applications are available over a VPN, dial-in modems, or even bridged networks with little trouble. The data is also centralized meaning there's no synch issues within the office. When Mary updates a record Sam gets that information immediately. These applications are also client agnostic so they'll run on just about anything with a web browser.
Centralized web services are capturing the hearts and minds of a lot of companies anymore. Clients for such services can be thin or fat and can run whatever OS is practical. An office full of iMacs can access a web service just as well as an office full of HPs running Linux. If Java is ditched down the road for Perl or Python the database server isn't going to go tits up.
Java's death never really happened, it's just that its success came from an area no one really expected early on. Perl's met with similar success. What started off as a language to parse server logs and turn huge data files into meaningful information became the premiere CGI language on the web. While a successful word processor might never be written in Java, the language and environment are far from dead.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
When I was unemployed, I had monster.com and dice.com send me a daily email with every new job posting that contained "Perl" or "Java". For those ten months, I saw virtually no Perl jobs, and almost every Java-related job required J2EE experience.
So I took a basic class in J2EE, and said to myself, "No wonder there are so many openings for J2EE programmers: it takes a team of five J2EE programmers a month to put together what a good Perl hacker can make in a week." The hoops you have to jump through to get things to work in J2EE--most of which seem to involve working around Java's static typing and its object model--are absurd.
I've been re-employed for almost a year, thank God, and the group I work with is writing a J2EE-based ERP application. I have seen nothing so far to refute my original impression of J2EE.
But it still beats being unemployed.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
The article notes that a googlefight gives 66 million hits for java and 386 million for
Thing is, the
The article is trying to make out like Java 'went away', just so it can build momentum for a comeback. I don't care for Java as a technology, but I'm pretty sure it never 'went away' at all -- and the fact that Java developers are cheap and common compared to almost every other kind is going to keep Java on the servers for a long long time.
I wish Mono would hurry up.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
can you elaborate on that? i don't quite understand... where exactly do you save time over MVC? where does the MVC paradigm say you need to copy anything? Example: the java TableModel. it's an interface, so my model can implement this interface and JTable will access the values directly, without doing any copying.
i have written many MVC apps in Java, and they are performing quite well. The performance improvements i make usually start and end with one single thing: Remove unneccessary updates. Most Java programmers don't realize, but their screens get updated 10 times from all kinds of different updating mechanisms. E.g. user clicks button, update event is fired, sometimes two, a chain of update events from all sorts of components that change as a result triggers a chain of repaint events. Now, if you hold off with updating until all update events have settled down, you paint 10 (and i have seen up to 100 times) less.
Result: what was sluggish is all of a sudden blazingly fast. Even though you "wait" for the event queue to clear.
This is something that one would expect Java to do internally, esp. if you are familiar with the way updating works, but in reality, it's the bottleneck.
The reason i usually adhere to MVC is that it allows you to have multiple views on one model and to easily add more views to one model.
I'm calling BS on this explanation. Unless your model and view are communicated via SOAP or the proverbial horse and carriage, there is little reason for in-process communication to be a bottle neck for applications.
In my experience, the slowness of an application can usually be narrowed down to a few hot spots where the wrong data structure is in use, or database access is done poorly. None of this relates to MVC.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
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.
In the first article, Eric Allman says I'm curious about a couple of other languages. My favorite language to hate is Perl. It seems like no real thought was given to the language. It kind of grew over the years. So it's just really deeply, deeply ugly.
And this is from the guy who wrote Sendmail !
But that's not what Java is being used for. The most common usage of Java is for high volume dynamic web sites such as Amazon.com and most online banking systems. The combination of Java servlets, Java Server Pages and Java based web engines (WebSphere or Web Logic for example, or even Apache and Tomcat) are becoming the most common usage of Java.
I work at a major California bank and have worked on various web based applications for about 9 years. Java is the standard for writing those types of dynamic web apps. For example. When you want to see your financial summary you wouldn't expect that there is somebody writing a web page just for you every time to make an ATM transaction would you? Of course not. You log in and we identify you. Then we go to an Oracle database or a bank host system and get your transaction history. We load that into a data object and pass it to a JSP which dynamically creates the web page with your transaction history. Java excels at that kind of application. And by the way, I can develop my code in Windows 2000, move it to a Linux box to do some basic testing, and then move it (all without recompiling) to an IBM AIX Unix box and have everything work the same on all these different environments. That makes my job easier.
So we need to stop comparing apples to oranges and saying things that essentially sum up to "A badly written Java program is slower than a well written C program" or "Java was slow 6 years ago so it's still slow today" or "I don't agree with the language designer's choice of [properties, no operator overloading or whatever language peeve you have]". Look at how the language is actually being used and you'll see that Java is indeed alive and well.