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Interview With the Father of Java
Eh-Wire writes "The Globe & Mail interviews James Gosling after a keynote talk to Sun developers in his home town of Calgary. His thoughts and comments regarding the 'dead end' oil industry, disconnected Telco strategist, and unleashing 'creative weirdoes' makes for an interesting read." From the article: "Java is evolving. It's sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet. There's been tremendous adoption of Java for building large-scale enterprise apps. It's worked tremendously well there. There's been all kinds of growth lately in cellphones and more and more embedded systems. It's all about making the environment around us more intelligent."
As far as Java goes, I would take anything this guy says with a grain of salt. This guy has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to Java.
It's sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet. There's been tremendous adoption of Java for building large-scale enterprise apps.
I was wondering why everything online has been slower lately.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Funny. Some Mozilla people were just about how Sun completely screwed up and all the different places (LAMP, interaction with webpages, etc.) where java could have been big, but wasn't.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
And here I thought that James Gosling invented PHP.
...but what state is Calgary in?
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
Blame Canada!
Expat living in SoCal.
Slashdot just went pink! ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH! I can't see! ... bastards
Philosophy.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
What did someone accidentally use the GMT clock to set off the April fools script?
...I'd just say you're exactly right; my precise reaction was "WTF!".
More pink than you'd see in a Hustler pictorial of Barbra Cartland (and that's a lot of pink). And Babs nude would probably be prettier to look at...yes, it is that bad...
Blank until
Right here and install it in Mozilla/SeaMonkey/Firefox. Then disable colors and go to /. or refresh the home page. :) Or just use any text Web browsers!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
why aren't any of the cool and useful websites being created with java on the back-end ? Honestly, I believe the problem here is more with Java developers than Java itself. Java developers are constantly trying to overwrite their code (as in writing more than necessary, not saving over an existing file:). Instead of using the KISS mentality, everything has to have an XML configuration file and object factory. Java devs are typically very black and white, code to the requirements, check off the features on their checklists, etc. On the other hand, Google has said they use Java for a number of applications. It's a great tool in the right hands. why has java been relegated to the enterprise space only ? A number of reasons... PHBs feel more comfortable with a "proven" solution with "corporate backing" versus all that pony tail and birkenstock hippie open source stuff (kidding!). Also, the creative types that typically make the 'innovative' web applications usually shy away from the corporate stigma that Java has. See the above comment. Java developers are typically viewed as corporate shills. why is java almost dead on the desktop ? I'll concede that this is due to Java itself. AWT sucked, Swing is marginally better... SWT seems to be the way to go but since Sun didn't invent it they're not going to back it. what are you smoking Gosling...when you say that java is still evolving ? Do you own a newer cell phone? Does it have cool features like text messaging and possibly web browsing? If so, your phone more than likely runs J2ME.
ummm guys, its april fools, NOT Single-awareness-day!! FIX THE DAMN PAGE, PLS.....Its burns....
Well if it isn't the leader of the wiener patrol, boning up on his nerd lesson...
Check out the cool pink frames. Or is it a self-inflicted April Fool's wound?
But, where are the ponies? I want my ponies! I see no ponies!!!!!
You are not the customer.
The preview is there for a reason...
why aren't any of the cool and useful websites being created with java on the back-end ?
Honestly, I believe the problem here is more with Java developers than Java itself. Java developers are constantly trying to overwrite their code (as in writing more than necessary, not saving over an existing file:). Instead of using the KISS mentality, everything has to have an XML configuration file and object factory. Java devs are typically very black and white, code to the requirements, check off the features on their checklists, etc.
On the other hand, Google has said they use Java for a number of applications. It's a great tool in the right hands.
why has java been relegated to the enterprise space only ?
A number of reasons... PHBs feel more comfortable with a "proven" solution with "corporate backing" versus all that pony tail and birkenstock hippie open source stuff (kidding!). Also, the creative types that typically make the 'innovative' web applications usually shy away from the corporate stigma that Java has. See the above comment. Java developers are typically viewed as corporate shills.
why is java almost dead on the desktop ?
I'll concede that this is due to Java itself. AWT sucked, Swing is marginally better... SWT seems to be the way to go but since Sun didn't invent it they're not going to back it.
what are you smoking Gosling...when you say that java is still evolving ?
Do you own a newer cell phone? Does it have cool features like text messaging and possibly web browsing? If so, your phone more than likely runs J2ME.
The "Java isn't open source" whining is really starting to piss me off. I can download the Java sources easily, I can even use my gained knowledge to serve my own need, its only a matter of licencing and people who probably didn't even bother to read it feel bad because it isn't "Open Source".
So what is open source? Isn't that the same as "making the source code available" ? And well; that is exactly what Sun is doing, I can't explain else how I happen to have obtained the Java source code myself. Or is this suddenly different because in this case "Open Source" doesn't mean "Free" ? That would mean that some Open Source evangalists are now keeping a double agenda. "Yes, open source is a great business model because you can make money from it, just look at companies like RedHat" vs. "I'm not allowed to use the Java source the way I want to, its not free so its not open source!". Its not free... And how exactly are we going to make money from Open Source?
This is IMO a continous tyrade by people who don't wish to think further than the "open source, free software!" hype.
For the record, in response to the BLOG, Netbeans was written in Java too. In fact, you can even extend its functionality with Java code and it has features which have yet to make it in Eclipse. Gee, its another Sun product and because Sun doesn't Open Source Java it has to stink too!. It would be nice if some Open Source evangalists would keep an open mind and focus on what Open Source actually implies. OPEN source. Not FREE SOFTWARE.
I attended the Sun Developer Day in Calgary this week that Mr. Gosling gave the "keynote" at.
...Hmmm, I'm sensing a unique opportunity to enrage both the Apple zealots AND the Java zealots in one post! ;)
The talk was almost the exact same rambling "Java is everywhere..." speech that he's been giving for years now. The highlight was when his Mac completely locked up during the presentation and he had to do a cold restart! He claimed it's never happend before in 5 years of Mac use...
Anyway, my point is that Sun has a long history of exploiting some of their top talent by forcing them to travel around the world giving these lightweight marketing talks at corporate events. I remember in the late 90's it was the same thing with Bill Joy. They had him doing so many talks in different cities every day that the actual meeting was in a room at the airport! He was literally on the ground for less than 2 hours, then off to the next stop.
They fly these guys around on these whirlwind trips to try to draw people to marketing events they would otherwise not bother with. It's seems like such a waste of talent/time. Maybe Sun would be better off letting Gosling and his ilk work on interesting projects that might actually provide Sun with new revenue sources, or at least give them something new and interesting to talk about when they do have to give speeches.
Even at JavaOne, Gosling's role in Java has been reduced to little more than the "funny looking guy that throws out the T-shirts". It's sad really, I never thought I'd feel sorry for James Gosling, but on Tuesday I did.
Dude, 'open source' is, hystorically, just the marketing term for 'free software' for the suits, which emphasizes collaboration over freedom. Woopiedoo.
There is even a definition on the OSI web site, right over at http://www.opensource.org/ which conincidentally contains about 8 clauses of the 10 that the Sun license you DON'T quote (i.e.the one for actual source code from Sun, rather than the licenses of open source products from other people that Sun BUNDLED in their proprietary software) does not live up to. Get your links straight, AC.
Open Source is a whole lot more than just source code access. It is also about freedom, right there, in the open source definition. Go check it out, it's fun to learn new things.
cheers,
dalibor topic
There's a problem when you have to write more lines of XML code than source code.
How does one make java load FAST? Like, tight as a nun's cunt?
Example: A basic MFC (like VC98) app will take half a second to load on a 64meg 400MHz celeron. Using the latest jre1.5.0_06, the equivalent do-nothing single form Swing app can take up to 4-5 seconds to load.
I think this load time leads to the "Java is slow" perception some people have. Thoughts?
Does this guy have any excuse why Java isn't compatible with itself? Why won't something written to run in 1.4.1 run in 1.4.2, or 1.5? All this ends up meaning is that no matter how interesting java the language is, when you get something written in java, it comes out of the box broken. Seriously, if I install two java products on my computer, each written in a different version of java, they break one another, unless I come up with a work-around.
For a language to be so incompatible with itself, no matter how you cut it, or what last-minute workaround you manage to cough up, that is so wrong there is no final verdict to pass on java other than "FAILURE".
I've had to tell people walking in the door with 30k$ products to get lost because it written in java. Why? Because it was found to break the 100k$ product written in another version on java. That makes it range anywhere from 100% dysfunctional to just a run of the mill nightmare to deal with. Other bendors trot out their java-powered web sites, and it ends up either not working because of another currently deployed java product or it breaks the currently deployed java product. Unfortunety for that vender, they get the distinction of being labeled 'unable to support services' - for no reason other than that they just had to do it in java.
As a matter of practice, anyone suggesting using java to implement something should just have their tounge cut out and stapled to their foreheads. Before they're fired.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Just because he was one of the inventors doesn't mean he has a clue about Java's development since then.
Figurehead to parade to Java fanatics?
JSF with AJAX. He's saying the desktop will be just the evolution of a terminal, aka a WebBrowser. Of course we all know that's marketing...
In the end, I think Java is evolving in non-traditional web apps (aka RoR apps) and into mobile, P2P, multimedia, etc... That's looking at it compared to C/C++.
On the enterprise level, it in a way has become the new COBOL since it's so embedded in a lot of back end apps, it will take good justification and some time to port the same functionality to something like (not flaming) RoR or Python.
why Java is so suboptimal compared to languages like Objective-C and APIs like OpenStep/Cocoa. I mean Java is like some sort of second infusion of Coffee (and we all know that only green tea is better at the second infusion ;-) ): you know what it is supposed to be but it just doesn't taste like the real thing.
;-)
Doubly astonishing so since SUN was co-developing OpenStep in team with NeXT, so they should have known how to design a proper API and what language features are needed for this. Now the Java API is bloated to no end and still incomplete: I miss the virtuosity of the small but feature complete OpenStep API (why aren't there methods like componentsJoinedByString and componentsSeparatedByString or the goodie makeObjectsPerformSelector in the counterpart java.util.ArrayList available? Or just simple things like a constructor like this: NSArray(java.lang.Object[]). Those were only some randomly picked small examples. Not to speak of key value coding or EOF what most of you probably don't know.). I am linking here not to the Objective-C Cocoa docs (here I miss categories most, although I must admit that those would be a potential security issue for Java Applets (that's where Java made it's first steps: in the webbrowser)) but to the Webobjects JavaDoc to show that such stuff is possible with Java. Only god (and the SUN) knows why they did not make it so. In lieu thereof we've got a plethora of collection classes which overlap a lot in functionality. That pattern shows everywhere in the "official" Java APIs.
And don't get me started on WO/EOF vs. J2EE
exuse my poor english, it is not my native tongue.
regards, sqar
As an unfortunate software developer on one of Sun's high profile embedded Java projects, OCAP, it irks me to see Java and Embedded listed in the same sentence. I could rant for days on the shortcomings of Java and it's unsuitability for an embedded environment but to name some of my biggest peeves...
1. Any language without unsigned primitive types doesn't belong in embedded land. Embedded systems frequently use unsigned data types. Making me cast up to a bigger primitive size and doing all kinds of bit manipulation gyrations to make unsigned byte data come out right is just wrong.
2. Most embedded implementations don't have room for a JIT compiler. So you end up interpreting everything or precompiling on the way down to the embedded device. Most embedded devices these days still have pretty lame CPUs in them so everything Java is extra extra slow even relative to a desktop counterpart. Especially if you're doing an app with any kind of graphics. As for pre-compiling...this simply isn't an option in some deployments...say OCAP for instance!
3. Many embedded environments use multithreading to process various IO tasks etc. Having what amounts to a critical section for your only means of synchronization (and yea Java 5 tries to solve this but most embedded devices are still back on 1.x implementations of Java) leads to one heck of a deadlock nightmare if you aren't very careful with your design. I need not cite the performance hit here either if you're lazy with your syncs. I also need not mention that the thread scheduling is left unspecified so your app may run OK on one JVM but when you port ot another there's no telling...
4. Java requires a lot of memory if you really want to do something useful. Especially anything graphics related. Most embedded devices don't abound with a ton of memory. As such you end up garbage collecting more and running into problems. Garbage collection can be a costly operation per #2 above. And finding a memory leak in a Java program ain't no picnic either. Especially on an embedded device where you may or matynot be able to get tools in there to see what's going on.
Yeah you can circumvent some issues if you're smart about your design and don't do stupid things but so far most embedded Java developers I've met are imports from desktop/server land and don't think about this stuff so you can imagine the mess you end up with.
Just my two cents...
Now I know I am going to get mod down, tossed to the wolves, raked over the coals with an inbox full of your nuts -- but here goes because after spending 4 years in Java I now have an opinion.
Java is bloatware and sells hardware. It is great on a desktop as an applet or even as a program running locally where you have 2GB or ram and dual procs to itself. But it has no freaking business on a server. In fact, those writing server apps in Java are plain utterly stupid.
Lets do the math... I have 600 users on a machine using C/C++ based programs, runs quite confortable with a DB and 8GB of RAM.
Now some Java replacement, needs 256MB per user. 256MB * 600 == happy salesperson. T2000 are nice machines, but to run much of that Java code you need many of them.
Ya, I know Java is threaded... how many developers know that and server 600 users out of one instance? Even if it is nicely threaded with apache, if you have to restart the VM for some reason you kick all users off. Messy.
I hear someone say Java runs as fast as C... if I ever meet them I hope they are a betting person.
Java is for those too lazy to learn C/C++.
I assumed this was just another April fools day joke, especially when someone commented that Calgary was in Texas (!!omg!!), but it seems like the article went up too early for that which means... it is real?
Java has some uses, some really good uses, but I stopped waiting for it to change the world years ago, Sun should pour the money it uses on pretending Java is going to change everything into development instead, then maybe some day we can actually use Java to make a decent graphical application, render HTML, perform (period), etc.
Wouldn't you have expected him to say instead that it was intelligently designed?
... FUD Microsoft.
... Now!
... Here!
... the "Internet Programming Language?"
... say it ain't so!
Java is just SUN FUD. Nothing else. Remember the Sun Java Workstation
that they showed, well they showed the plastic case at least, at the
CES in 1996.
1996!!!!!! How could that be!!!!?????
Isn't Java
Isn't Jave
Isn't Java
Mr. Bill
Toodles!
Oh and on this subject, there should be a built-in simple way to convert a byte[] into a plain old hexadecimal string. They have ways of doing pretty much everything, including manipulating zip files, URL-encoding, on and on, but no built-in way to convert a string to hex.
Don't get me wrong, Java really is an excellent language for low-level network coding, and in fact a DNS server I wrote in pure Java was able to out-perform BIND, so it is a great language for this stuff. It's just that I always find myself getting stuck occasionally on bit twiddling.
Anyway, one of things that hurt Java was there was too much hype for running it on the desktop, when the reality was... AWT. At this point, with Java 6, Swing is getting quite excellent. I now think that Java is also a first-class desktop app development language. ----------
Contact management, sales automation, time zones, mobile alerts
Why wouldn't they? It's an international site, not specific to one country, and the closest thing we have to a standard time format is GMT.
Of course Java was originally designed as a language for set-top boxes, which is an embedded application. It was only when the set-top box thing wasn't going anywhere and somebody decided to write a web browser with it that Sun released it and it became popular.
dom
Maybe the father of Java can get the people in charge of Java at SUN to learn to count and get consistent with the version numbers on Java and stick to it without skipping numbers as well.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I think you probably don't understand how Java server stuff works. Your reference to Apache being part of a Java server deployment shows that. It used to be, back in the old days a few years ago, that people often installed Tomcat and Apache together using a connector. I don't know anyone who still does this. Tomcat 5 servers static content about as fast as Apache.
As for threading: If you're writing a web application, you don't need to write any threads. You need to give a little bit of thought to threads, because your Servlets are objects and they can be used by multiple threads at the same time. Handling this is quite trivial: you just don't touch any instance variables from methods in your servlet. If you don't want to try to figure out threading, that's all you need to know. Tomcat will do all the rest.
Again, I have no clue where you got that 256mb per user, but I'll clarify a few points. In a typical Java Servlet application, which would use Tomcat (or similar) to serve an application where users log in, do stuff, and data are stored in a DB, this is how resource use will work:
I really don't think you understand how these things work, and if you have real-world experience with Java webapps, then the ones you are thinking of were written by clowns.
-----------Contact management, calendar management, sales automation
and lets get naked
This makes large programs work, and stay working.
-- ac at home
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in *unary*, and those who don't need to use their fingers and toes, er, "can't". :-)
Personally, my money is on the unary group being the larger of the 11 / 10 / 2 groups.
Off-topic as can be, happy April 1...
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
http://static.flickr.com/19/121338473_07823a9da0_b .jpg
b .jpg
;)
yes, the guy in the yellow shirt is the java guy.
http://static.flickr.com/19/121342959_449ed7dea0_
it seems that java _can_ defend itself
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have encountered that situation -- built something under 1.4 on Windows, unable to run it on 1.5 on Linux, and various permutations. I find the easiest thing is to distribute sources and have people build the darned thing with whatever Java they have on their system.
Useful websites like weather.com, ebay.com, or wallmart.com? They all run on java.
Yes, bloat.
If I never see another BuffereredDataStreamBufferReaderWriterBufferStream Reader (or whatever that was), it'll be too soon. Bleh. Java is soooo last-century.
Don't start with me about Microsoft-only with C#. There's Mono, you know, so why not broaden that Linu-centric viewpoint you have, eh?