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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."
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.
WTF?!?!?!
And what's this about ponys?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
"OMG!!!Ponies!!!"? CoyboyNeal, am I missing something? :)
Why is the main page pink? damnit
"And Australia's all down there like 'WTF?'"
Seriously though, whats with the pink???
"The goggles! Zey do nussing!"
Haxorz? Must be hte Haxorz! Oh... crap. We're getting this stuff a day early. Not again.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
april fools joke its april first in GMT
I believe it is now April 1 in GMT. Is that related? Don't know.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
Logically I think the pink if because it just turned April 1st GMT, although I may have that backwards. In any case it also makes it near impossible to read people's user names against a gray background, so the majority of you have no idea that I am replying to myself.
Philosophy.
Shoot. I wish I thought of that first.
It's already April 1st in Greenwich.
What did someone accidentally use the GMT clock to set off the April fools script?
yep: http://images.slashdot.org/slashdot_fool.css
...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.
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.
There in my van you want to come see them?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Nah, that ain't nothing. What will really cook your sushi is when Slashdot comes up with a dupe of this prank tomorrow morning!
Am I a hipster-doofus?
I hate April 1st.
wheeee!1!1!
Can I have this as a default? Pleeeaaaasse!?1?!!?
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Can I have this as a default? Pleeeaaaasse!?1?!!?
you probably can if you use the slashdot-fools.css stylesheet. I imagine they will keep it online. Or you might want to just download it and save it.
Qxe4
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.
The real problem was that it came so late.
Java used to have(1.4 did, and I think the first of 1.5 did too) a license that did not permit distribution of changes made to the sources, and what was worse REQUIRED that you distributed all 50+MB of the jre with your application, insted of just bundling the things you actuelly needed.
That made it really bad to do desktop java applications because even a small application would come with a 50MB jre.
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...
You are just just FUD-ing around, right? There is a -target option to javac for a good reason. You use the -target option to ensure that your compiled code will run successfully on a certain VM level (and *all* later versions).
It is really a shame if someone is building (God forbid .. distributing) Java applications without taking advantage of this fantastic feature.
There's a problem when you have to write more lines of XML code than source code.
I haven't had that problem. Yes, my XML docs can get pretty huge as a project progresses, but still it is small compared to the amount of Java code. In any case, XML configuration is useful enough (e.g. when used in Spring), it makes it especially easy to make custom builds for different customers. Convention over configuration is not always useful.
#!/
Did I miss something, or wasn't this the exact point of the article the original poster linked to?
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++.
Yeah, who vomited bubble gum all over the place? ...At least, I *hope* that's bubble gum.
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.
The problem isn't the amount of XML out there. The problem is that there's more than just XML (e.g. property files), and that every Java framework comes with its own XML schema.
Wouldn't you have expected him to say instead that it was intelligently designed?
Haven't you seen annotations ?
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.
The people who come up with the Computer Science AP exam should therefore have their tongues cut out and stapled to their foreheads before being fired.
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.
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
DAAAMMMMNNIT!!!!!!
I cheated on my girl friend (she was offline so I talked to another chick on Messenger), I'm sure she hacked Slashdot!!!
ENOUGH ! You shouldn't touch my Slashdot! i'm gonna break up.
It is really a shame if someone is building (God forbid .. distributing) Java applications without taking advantage of this fantastic feature.
.. distributing) Java applications without taking advantage of this kludge.
It is really a shame if someone is building (God forbid
Fixed that for you.
Have you tried the same with a .NET app? Same issue. VB6 had like a 4 meg runtime. Java's is about 16 meg. .NET is about 24 meg. You do the math.
The installer is 16MB, but the size of the jre once installed is ~50M. (The size difference comming from the fact that the installer is compressed)
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?
On my 2GHz portable just about any GUI app takes several seconds to load, Java or not.
And when you find yourself having to debug XML because your application doesn't work. I am unconvinced about having wiring in XML instead of code.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
The installer is 16MB, but the size of the jre once installed is ~50M. (The size difference comming from the fact that the installer is compressed)
But if it is only 16MB to install, who cares how big it is afterwards? 50MB is insignificant in terms of disk space these days.
"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.
I'll try that and see if I can get ciscoworks' and fluke's and mci's java to play together, which they don't right now. Of course, it still doesn't change the fact the all those products, to name just a few, because they need java to run, don't work, and the workaround/kludge required to get them to work is needed for one reason only - java. Other languages don't have this problem. Why java?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
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?