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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."
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.