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James Gosling on Java
prostoalex writes "It's been ten years since the official introduction of Java - a programming language combined with virtual machine and a class library. ZDNet published an interview with James Gosling, the creator of Java, who talks about the project's past, present and future."
Yes, Java is slower to run than C++. However Java is faster to write than C++; and I think that's the real issue.
In terms of power of expressivity, I think they're about the same, but I find Java easier to read than C++, and I find that mid-level programmers make far fewer subtle "shoot yourself in the foot" mistakes in Java than they do in C++. The run-time array bounds checking, lack of pointers, checked exceptions, and the lovely NullPointerException serve to keep a lot of people out of trouble. The embarrassing wealth of pre-written, tested, free, source-available modules Java has, over the reinvent-the-wheel approach of C++ goes a long way in improved programmer productivity. Here's a test for you: have one of your middle-skilled programmers do some network communication in Java and C++ and see which program takes less time to write and works better.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Eclipse claims to have about 45% of the Java IDE market, however that is about as accruate claiming that Firefox has 67 millions users. Eclipse uses the download count to get an estimate, I'd guess its closer to maybe 30%. I believe Netbeans is around 15%-25% and rising fast. Netbeans has won multiple awards in many areas for IDE design. Eclipse is really just a foundation and corporations pay big bucks to get in on it. Eclipse's drive isn't the community, the foundation members decide where eclipse is going. Eclipse is a good basic IDE but for anything extensive, you need to download a ton of plugins and/or buy proprietary ones.
With a default install of Netbeans, you get a full IDE with regular java programming capabilites and standard features (code completion, java doc, etc...), GUI application tools, it includes a great RAD for gui interfaces. You get WebServices programming capabilities with a fully integrated IDE and application server. With 2 other downloads on netbeans.org, you get a full J2ME development environment,including a gui tool to create interfaces for mobile phones, along with about 10 different phone emulators. You also get an enterprise level memory and performance profiler.
All in all, Netbeans is much better integrated and provides many more features. Eclipse hasn't really innovated for well over a year now, and many of its sub projects are hardly under development anymore. Netbeans used to have a bad reputation because it was a memory hog, slow, and for many years it was under stagnant development. In the past 2 years though, its made a complete 180 and is fast, full featured, and probably the best IDE in the market. Give it a shot if you haven't and use it for a bit. Its free, so its not like you're losing anything.
Regards,
Steve
There are other attacks, but most of the "exploits" are due to a buffer overflow (90% of all exploits? 95%?). Heck, if I'm am not mistaken it was a buffer overflow that put an end to the "x years without a hole in the default OpenBSD install" slogan :(
Now how many buffer overflow did happen in the JVM in the last 10 years?
I think the answer is zero. And if it's not zero, it's only some implementation of the JVM that was at fault.
For me it's all about the sandbox. Java, Jython, Groovy, you-name-it... I don't care. As long as it targets the JVM. It's tried, lean, mean, rock solid technology. You just ain't escaping it.
In TFA (yup, I did read it), Gosling says that "The only serious divide is they (C# / .Net) have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode."
That's a good principle to believe in.
Everytime java is discussed on slashdot, I'm amazed at how some junior leaguers try to dismiss it because they can point out one application where java is a poor choice.
There are some applications where it does not make sense to implement in java. However, I say that java is a great choice for the top layer of a web application server stack. There are a lot of web apps that take the form of:
1. Gather data from one or more databases.
2. Perform some consolidation and express the output in html.
In this example, java is a consolidator of data from disparate data sources. It needs to hang on to several network connections and do some simple IO but it does not need to burn the CPU at 100% because it spends most of it's time blocked on IO. Java is a great choice for applications like this because there is a very large and active community working to make java dynamic web serving better and better. Every year your organization can, for free, upgrade to a new version of java and simple app server like Tomcat and reap the rewards of the communities improvements. Also, in my experience with server applications, the promise of portability is real. I've ported from windows to solaris and then to linux without changing the java application.
As I was searching for some info about JBuilder, I stumbled across this juicy bit that I had not seen before.
a d_id=34246
Borland announces JBuilder Roadmap; future will be Eclipse-based
The jist of the story is that in the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based !!!
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thre
below is much of the article text in case it gets swamped.
Borland has announced their technical roadmap for JBuilder. Later this year Borland will ship JBuilder 2006 which will add shared code and shared debugging features. In the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based and add better dependency analysis features.
The shared code and debugging will allow developers in different locations to participate in shared coding and debugging, as though they were sitting down together in the same room.
The Eclipse news follows up from their February announcement of joining the Eclipse board and their intention to re-build their entire application life cycle management product suite on top of Eclipse. Borland sees Eclipse as an integration framework upon which they will be building JBuilder as well as their other products. By leveraging Eclipse, they can realize the cost savings of not having to worry about maintaining IDE functionality, and integration with other Borland tools, as well as gaining a larger audiece via Eclipse and benefitting from the large ecosystem of Eclipse tools.
According to Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland, the major new addition planned for Peloton will be a dependency analysis feature. It will be able to understand the dependencies between different artifacts in the project, such as the link between JSP's and struts controllers, EJB's and the persistence tier, without the user needing to configure these explicitly or switch views. Debugging will be improved - stepping into different tiers will be easier without end users needing to manually set additional breakpoints.
Code-name Peloton comes from a cycling metaphor, which is used to describe a group of cyclists who can ride faster together than they could individually, reflecting Borland's emphasis on team collabortation features in JBuilder.
Borland has not announced any pricing information, but they are looking into offering a separate 'distribution' of JBuilder on Eclipse all integrated to make it easy for corporate clients to deploy.
Borland chose Eclipse over Netbeans after watching industry momentum and listening to customers who think Eclipse will be their next major platform.
When asked about what their differentiators for JBuilder-Eclipse over Websphere Studio will be, Borland responded that WS Studio is focused on Websphere, whereas JBuilder supports multiple application server platforms.
Luis De La Rosa in his 2005 predictions suggested that Eclipse will become the Java community's answer to Visual Studio.NET, as a de facto IDE; this being a good thing for the Java community, as Eclipse will help build a market/ecosystem for development tools much like Visual Basic, which is the real goal that Sun wants to reach: 10 million developers using Java.
Borland's decision to join IBM in basing their IDE on Eclipse is certainly bringing us closer to that prediction! What do you think?
They entirely overhyped it in areas where it's relatively useless (the desktop) and entirely underhyped it in areas where it's extremely useful (backend and embedded areas).
Now ten years later you talk about "java" and all anyone remembers are those horrible, sluggish AWT applets, running on netscape 4.0's broken JVM, which they used during the initial Java hype push. But almost nobody these days knows about the success Java met in unglamorous areas after the hype push had died off.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If anyone intends to post follow-up criticism to this post, be aware: Arguing with me will not make you right. I've already moved on. Don't waste your time.
So you are right no matter what and you want to have the last word in this. That's different from a five-year-old how?
Anyway, your long rant about stupid people behaving in a stupid way and your superiority over them doesn't touch the topic of smart people and how they interact. Small talk may prevent people from reaching Borg collective efficiency in terms of communication, but there is a lot more to it. You didn't figure that out yet, and you seem to be determined to keep it that way in the future. Good luck with that attitude!