Will Sun Open Source Java?

capt turnpike writes "According to eWEEK.com, there's an internal debate going on at Sun whether to open-source Java. (Insert typical response: "It's about time!") Company spokespersons have no official comment, as might be expected, but perhaps we could hear confirmation or denial as early as May 16, at the JavaOne conference. One commentator said, "Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java." Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes? Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"

Comments

If they do, it will all depend upon the license.

[khasim]

"Open Source" covers a LOT of licenses.

What changes and how would depend upon which license was chosen.

No

[aliquis]

"Will Sun Open Source Java?"
No, haven't they already said that? Like hundreds of times? And does it really matter?

"Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java."
"No", who would run PHP on Java anyway? Why? Why would open-sourcing it help?

"Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes?"
No, Java is already desirable in my eyes.

"Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"
No, what is lacking?

People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.

Re:No

[Enonu]

Hear Hear!

Will people stop trying to move Java towards a culture that won't keep Java up to the same standards Sun has? There's a reason why the top two server side platform these days are .NET and Java, and it's because a there's a quality standard and completeness not found elsewhere. The next time I look at another configured by altering it's code, hard tied to MySQL, non-tiered POS LAMP application, I'm going to cry.

The only place I ever see Java going is perhaps to be bought by another bigger company who has a similar path. My only hope is that it's IBM because their Java apps are of a higher quality than Sun's, and they've done such good work with the Eclipse platform.

Re:No

[JanneM]

People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.

Irrespective of any ideological issues, there are a few reasons the current situation hurts Java a bit.

Foremost for quite a few readers of slashdot is that free Linux distributions can't include Java in their default install. That means Java-based apps are not going to be included either. And since users need to jump through quite a few hoops to get Java installed (don't say "it's easy" - for most people anything beyond using their package manager is too high a hurdle), you can't assume it will be available on desktops in general.

The second issue is that Java does not really play well with the desktop. I have set up my desktop to run fine using three languages - English, Swedish and Japanese - and made sure everything from localization to character input works smoothly. But Java does not cooperate; it has its own way of dealing with CJK characters and needs its own fonts and separate setup to work. I have fiddled a little with it, but have never gotten it to work properly (especially being able to run an app in Swedish while still being able to input Japanese). And since it uses its own input method, it does not share the local dictionary so typing becomes frustratingly different from any other application I use. And since the code is not open, distributions can't fix these interoperability issues.

Both of these issues serve as disincentives from using Java apps and from writing them in the first place.

Re:No

[Surt]

"Will Sun Open Source Java?"
No, haven't they already said that? Like hundreds of times? And does it really matter?

Sure it matters. A lot of people have issues with it because of the license. It would clearly expand the number of potential adopters to go open source. More adopters will mean better tools.

"Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java."
"No", who would run PHP on Java anyway? Why? Why would open-sourcing it help?

Well, I agree with the first part. But presumably integration will get better/faster in open source.

"Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes?"
No, Java is already desirable in my eyes.

But a lot of people would find it more desireable. You can trust that java won't go away in open source, whereas you can't really say the same as long as SUN is at the helm.

"Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"
No, what is lacking?

Mostly modernizing. The pace of java development is glacial, compared to say what is going on in C# or Ruby. People with specific integration issues that can't get sun to address compatibility problems are stuck.

People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.
There's no doubt java is still slow in a number of contexts. There are also obvious opportunities for performance enhancement that could be addressed in an open source process. I recently benchmarked ten of my applications in c++ and java, java is about 2x slower for most of the cases I tried, and never faster. To me, that's perfectly acceptable, but java could make more inroads into other areas of computing if it was more competitive in performance. More inroads means more developers, and that means better tools, which is what I yearn for.

Re:No

[TheWama]

How about the people who claim it's tedious and sprawling*?

Simple example...

Java: BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in"));
Python: in = open('foo.in')
Ruby: in = File.open('foo.in')
C++: ifstream in; in.open("foo.in");

To be fair, I'm no Java expert, but in my experience with it, I'd have to be masochistic to look at it all day...

Re:No

[iabervon]

I'm not sure if you're complaining about development of the language and standard library API, or development of Sun's implementation. The language evolves about as fast as is prudent, because they're committed to having the language not have badly-designed features that need to either be incompatibly dropped or painfully maintained. So Java gets features essentially as soon as C++ has made all the mistakes related to those features.

On the other hand, Sun's Java compiler has always had broken dependancy tracking (at least since I started using it heavily in 1999). (If a build has an error, the set of output class files may be such that the next run of the compiler skips a source file which needs to be compiled; this is mainly that it can generate the public class without generating other classes in the same file.) I think it's likely that, if Sun does open source the JDK, they'll get fixes for a number of annoying flaws of that sort pretty quickly, and things that are clearly wrong but aren't considered worth working on will be improved substantially.

Of course, there's essentially no chance that they'll relax their grip on the language standard, and they probably shouldn't, unless they turn it over to a standards body due to no longer being able to employ good language designers.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The next time I look at another configured by altering it's code, hard tied to MySQL, non-tiered POS LAMP application, I'm going to cry.

Of course, any equivalent app in Java would have more lines of opaque XML configuration than the "POS LAMP application" has code. It will also be slower, eat several times as much memory, and depend on specific versions of two dozen frameworks.

The Rails version, OTOH, would be about 4 lines long and deployed before the Java guys managed to fire up their Eclipse bloatware. It would, however, be about the same speed as the Java app.

The Lisp version would never fail, would have source code in the form of a haiku, could tell the future and control the weather. It will never be written because all those parentheses look funny.

Re:No

[Cederic]

Sorry, but when I'm dealing with code written offshore by developers of mixed ability in a system integrating my mainframe to my fulfilment systems with customer web access, online payments, content management and back office consolidation thrown in then I want a language that's immediately readable.

Perl is exceedingly brief to write. It's also very difficult to read.
PHP/Python are better, but most code I see is frankly horrible.

With Java the APIs and libraries - even third party, even open source - have descriptive names. They make sense. You can figure out what's going on from the method and classnames, without having to go and read them.

This makes unfamiliar code easier to read. I've done Delphi/C/C++/perl/PHP programming, and none of them have as easy to read code as Java. I value that a lot.

That you have to type an extra 32 characters to open a file? Good! Hell, you're not typing enough already - 'in' is a bad name for a variable. How about making it descriptive, tell the reader what you're reading.

Modern IDEs do most of the typing for you. The clarity of the code that's written is more important than the extra two seconds you need to write it.

Re:No

[shish]

Why do none of your other language examples have an explicit buffer layer? You should add that, then see what the result is :P People in other languages have become used to reading chunks of a file into a buffer then parsing a bit, then reading a new chunk -- java people can just read what they want, when they want; IMHO adding a bufferedreader is a small price to pay to get rid of all the manual buffering~

While you're at it, make it read objects from a gzip compressed network stream:

new ObjectReader(new GZipReader(new SocketReader(new Socket("1.2.3.4", 42))));

(I'd really like someone to demonstrate this in other languages; having started with java and moved to C, things like gzip stream reading and network access seem like such unnecessary pains in the ass that I've never bothered to learn them properly...)

Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license

[SoloFlyer2]

I currently avoid Java like the plauge, my reasons are the same reasons that java isnt included in debian... http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-java-faq/ ch5.html#s-license-concerns if they address those license concers i would be much happier...

Save Apache some time ...

[SickLittleMonkey]

... and just do it.

WINE did it for Win32 and Mono did it for .NET, so Java *will* be open source some day anyway. Sun needs to get at least J2SE out there before .NET runs on every electronic device available.

Now that Sharp's Zaurus has dropped Java, .NET is looking like the only alternative for managed coding on handheld platforms. (Cellphones are not yet good PDAs, ok?)

SLM

Bad idea

[cpuh0g]

Why do people just assume that saying the magic words "open source" will automatically improve a particular piece of software? Rarely do the most vocal proponents of "open sourcing" something actually get involved and start contributing to the codebase. It's all about religion for the most part, unfortunately.

I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software. Don't you think Sun has heard that same complaint from some major league/big $$$$$ customers and done everything they could to improve said performance?

Even if they *do* open it up, Im sure the slashdot community will still hate them because they don't use a GPL variant license. Its a lose-lose situation for Sun, I don't get why they would even consider it. Is there a business case that will generate a 9-figure revenue jump from giving away the source for Java? I don't see it, but Im sure someone around here will happily clue me in.

Re:Bad idea

[goldsounds]

Rarely do the most vocal proponents of "open sourcing" something actually get involved and start contributing to the codebase. It's all about religion for the most part, unfortunately.

Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest, NOT to contribute to the code, NOT to get something for free, or even to become the "commodity" implementation of a specification.

The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded. This is the original philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU project, who were collectively the inspiration for the "open source" movement.

So if you're wondering why anything less than a GPL license is unsatisfactory to the hairy, unwashed free-software factinista, why don't YOU look up the facts and get a clue about the software freedoms that may, one day, mean that your descendants can read e-books, watch movies and examine the collected creative output of humanity unencumbered by the imposed obscurity of closed-source software, DRM and other impositions on our freedom.

Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.

Re:Bad idea

[dubl-u]

I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software.

Honestly, that's part of the problem.

Enterprise developers are used to a very particular envelope. That involves putting up with a lot of large-company bullshit and unfriendly tools. People in other environments have different needs that are poorly served by Java. And actually enterprise people have those needs too; they're just used to suffering.

Take all of the C#-inspired improvements in Java 1.5, for example. Many of them are about programmer convenience and improved expressiveness, neither of which mattered much until C# was a threat. Or consider EJB 3.0. EJB sucked for years until Hibernate, an open-source project, came along and beat the snot out of it. EJB 3.0 is basically a straight import of Hibernate.

Or take Ruby on Rails: you can't write that in Java. Why? My theory is that in large companies, they'll let you go away for three months and build infrastructure. Plus, neither Sun nor an enterprise architecture group trusts programmers with the kind of heavy wizardry that Rails uses to make things happen. So again, Sun gets its ass kicked by an open-source project.

If they really open it up, perhaps Sun can harness some of that power. But I'd bet they won't do it properly; Java reeks of "cathedral" thinking, and that papa-knows-best mentality is hard to shake.

Re:Bad idea

[dubl-u]

Gets its ass kicked? I don't see many people moving from Java to Ruby. From Perl, Python, and PHP, people are switching to Ruby in hordes. But from Java? A trickle, if anything.

You are missing my point. I am saying the enterprise approach to things only applies to a selection of software projects. Sun has ignored the ease-of-use and low-barrier-to-entry criteria for years and years. This means that small projects correctly don't use Java because it's not economical. They uses PHP, Rails, and the like.

But large projects often start as small projects, so Sun is, presumably accidentally, driving a lot of users away from Java. There is no good reason for this; the world wanted Rails, and Sun missed the boat. When I look at the Alexa Global 100, none of the up-and-comers I recognize seem to be using Java. I know that Craigslist, MySpace, and Flickr are built on those non-enterprise technologies you disdain; in a few years I'd bet will see some Ruby on Rails entries, but none for, say, Java Server Faces or Struts.

Enterprise developers are, by nature, unlikely to use Rails yet because they are relatively conservative. Java is, in many ways, the new COBOL. But Rails, which used Ruby's greater power to dramatically increase ease of use, now has created a substantial user base for Ruby.

And unlike Perl and PHP, Ruby has the potential to be an enterprise-scale language. It's a much better OO language than Java in many ways. With a few improvements, some supporting tools, and another five years, you will see Ruby invading enterprise shops if Sun doesn't counter effectively.

Re:Bad idea

[dubl-u]

You can't write Ruby on Rails in Java? Oh. Best tell these guys: https://trails.dev.java.net/ Enterprise developers deal with inadequacies in Java by doing what everyone else does: Writing their way around it. This is where struts, hibernate, ant, junit came from.

I'm sure the Trails guys will be the first to admit that Trails (like peers RIFE, Sails, and Stripes) is not as simple as Rails is. We Java developers are used to looking past the 30 lines of getter/setter boilerplate and other mysterious Java incantations. But that's not true for a lot of devs.

Both Struts and Hibernate prove my point in different ways. Struts gets around Java's limitations with reams of XML, a cure frequently worse than the disease. Hibernate is closer to the spirit of RoR, but that's not really Java either; they have to do heavy wizardry with bytecode manipulation and dynamic subclassing because Java doesn't give them the necessary power. And note that Hibernate came from outside Sun. Sun's attempt at the same the same thing was EJB, which has been deservedly, if belatedly, shot in the head.

As a senior technical person in a large enterprise I too seek the holy grail of letting business people enter their business processes into a pretty front-end and getting a fully featured website with full supply chain integration automatically generated.

Actually, that's not what I seek at all. I believe that software development is inherently complex; you can't ever automate the thinking away. What you can do is give the developer tools to aid their productivity, to make simple things easy and dangerous things hard. Let them focus their brainpower on the things that are actually worthy tasks.

For a data driven system, it's great. For a complex system integrating with multiple other systems, it's no easier to use.

Exactly. At the low end, it's easier; at the high end, it's the same (or perhaps a little worse). But what Sun is missing is the idea that development need not always be hard. Pehaps they'll learn that from Hibernate, which comes from an attitude very like RoR. If not, I hope they learn it from Rails.

And because it does so much magic under the skin, if that magic doesn't meet your needs, you struggle more to change it.

I agree completely. This is where I'm waiting to see how the RoR and Ruby communities mature. They've got the entry-level system taken care of, but can they provide a path to complex systems without the kinds of complexity cliffs that you see amateurs using Access or VB run smack into? I think that Ruby the language has horsepower that other easy-to-use tools don't, but we'll see if they can turn that potential into actual results.

Are you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open sourcing Java? Are you kidding me? Chaos would reign. Every month new features would crop up and we have to keep learning and learning and learning. Look at Ruby on Rails, new features every couple of days. Nobody can keep up.

No no no. Let Sun handle Java.

Re:Third-Party JVM

[IntlHarvester]

Microsoft's JVM was actually one of the fastest in the day and had extentions for a native GUI similar to eclipse. (Of course those extentions relied on illegal JVM tricks.) It was certainly much better than Netscape Java or early releases of Sun Java.

The main reason Java has a terrible reputation (IMO) is/was it's tendancy to hang/lockup/freeze your browser when an applet loads, and general clunkyness with Swing.

Why Should Sun Do This?

[javacowboy]

Writing a fully compliant JVM takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, especially the class libraries. Sun spent years writing that code, and none of the JCP partners can be bothered re-writing it themselves.

IBM, BEA, Oracle, etc pay Sun to license their source code so they can release compliant JVMs.

So, it should be no suprised the the open *cough*IBM*cough* source community "demands" that Sun open source Java. Guess how much money a certain company would save getting free source code that they're paying to license now? In the same of "the open source community", they'd like nothing better than to get the #1 competitor's hard work for free so they stop having to pay them for it.

The Java spec is open for anybody the re-implement, the source code is viewable by all, and the JDK is a free download. Sun has stated that they won't stand in the way of Apache Harmony or any other open source project that aims for a full open source implementation of the JVM/JDK spec.

So what exactly is the problem?

Re:Why Should Sun Do This?

[typical]

So what exactly is the problem?

I don't have the Sun JDK on my Fedora system by default because of the Sun license.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been adopting ocaml as the next big language. For once, Microsoft is technically ahead of its competitors -- ocaml (which Microsoft did not produce) is very fast and safe, and from a technical standpoint is much more impressive than C# and Java.

Plus, ocaml can be used as a pure functional language -- such languages eliminate almost all the reason to use (error-prone, difficult to guarantee correctness with) threads. Pure functional code is inherently parallelizable any time the compiler can say "hey, no data dependency here".

Ocaml is picking up quite a bit of steam -- there are a slew of open-source libraries for it out there, it's the only safe language that I'm aware of that provides performance comparable to C and C++, yadda yadda yadda. The INRIA ocaml compiler is open source (though, annoyingly, QPL instead of GPL). The runtimes and the stuff that you stuff into your code is LGPL. I didn't realize that Microsoft was backing it and integrating ocaml support into Visual Studio until quite recently, though. There have been gtk+ bindings for ocaml for a while, but MS may actually be ahead of the OSS world in providing complete ocaml bindings.

If you've never used ocaml before, wait until the first time you break in the debugger at a problem...and then step *backwards* to watch the problem occurring. It's simply delightful. :-) Plus, it's even more concise than C (which is saying quite a bit), is safe and garbage-collected, has very strict typing (I've heard one ML fan say "If your code compiles, it's correct" in only half-jest)...ah.

What's particularly satisfying is that C was well-designed -- for a specific set of systems and circumstances that don't apply to most application software development today. Ocaml is the first language in a long time that I've seen where I can say not just that the language has good ideas, but that it is really well-designed. It's also a lot better-suited to application development than C is.

Gah...sorry. Ocaml gives me the warm fuzzies.

Re:This would help

[WebMink]

it just requires spending the money to get it certified.

Actually, FreeBSD were given a license at no cost by Sun, and any not-for-profit organisation with a need for access to a Sun-maintained compliance test kit can get it at no charge. So it's really just a matter of having the motivation to ask.

"Sun should endorse PHP"

[oSand]

Yeah, because what the world needs is more php.

Personally I don't want Java open-sourced

[layer3switch]

I fear, some smart ass Java programmer will fork off the Java OpenSource and give some crackpot name like "Javalava" or "JavaJ" or "JuJu Bean" or "Grande Capacino"

I am scared...

Re:Open Java

[WebMink]

Otherwise why would Apache have the Harmony project to recreate J2SE?

Kaffe and GNU/Classpath are excellent, active projects with dedicated developers. Notably, GNU/Classpath has recently passed the 99% code coverage mark measured against the Java SE specification. Apache Harmony was started because Apache won't use code licensed under the GPL, not because of any technical defect in the work of the Kaffe and GNU/Classpath developers. Harmony is also making excellent progress and has a skilled and active community. Both are committed to making compatible implementations of Java, but licensed under the licenses their communities need.

Mustang changes this

[ashpool7]

The SCSL is going away in Java 1.6 in favor of some much more liberal licenses. I'll be able to compile and use it on my production FreeBSD server at work and not worry about being "tainted" as a programmer.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 437481

PHP and Java is oil and water

[benjymouse]

PHP is probably one of the best (worst) examples of what a language would look like if it was designed and developed incrementally in an open source community. It's hack upon hack upon hack. It's backward compatibility breaking changes is just about every point(!) release. Register_globals enyone? Magic quotes? Ambivalence towards types/objects - "type hinting". Arguably (and freely admitted by the designers) PHP is *not* a well designed language. It's a pragmatic ooops kind of language whose main advantage is a large (albeit somewhat amateurish) user base, and free availability. Java on the other hand - if anything - tends to be over-engineered. Swing is actually more flexible than even .NET Windows Forms (which was designed later). It's easier to combine widgets, e.g. put textboxes inside tree nodes, etc. Swing may be a little slow, but nothing Java has ever had that "hackish" feel to it. It's always well thought out. Same thing could be said about JSF, JDO and certainly EJB. Sun has always taken great care of minimizing BC breaking changes. Sun has always taken pride in being a little on the conservative side, i.e. only introduce well understood technologies. This has been received well by the enterprise developer community. PHP is nowhere near that yet. There's still tons of BC breaking changes in store for PHP developers when PHP finally will get namespaces, unicode support etc. To put it simple, the primary virtues of Java is nowhere to be found in PHP. And frankly, if PHP is the way a language looks like when it's designed by an open source community, open sourcing Java would possibly destroy it. A model like eclipse where it's formally open sourced but in reality still maintained by a single, competent organization might work, though.

Amazon is not LAMP

[XaXXon]

Yared has long called for Sun to open Java, which, he said, is "great on the back end, but LAMP is great on the Web tier, as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Flickr, MySpace and Friendster have shown.

Amazon is not LAMP.

Re:Amazon is not LAMP

[iamdrscience]

Amazon is not LAMP.

Quite right, they prefer COAL -- C, Oracle, Apache, Linux.

Re:Amazon is not LAMP

[XaXXon]

Wow, that is remarkably accurate *AND* has a nice acronym.

I'm very impressed.

Next time there's an outage, we'll say we ran out of COAL :)

Will it make the competion less desirable?

[IsThisBl**dyNameUniq]

Two major development platforms are .Net and Java. One is fairly Open Standard but not open source - and gets demands for Open Source. The other is not even open standard yet people accept this. Maybe the real issue is people can imagine a world where Java is totally open but don't ever expect .Net to be so don't bother discussing it (The wonderful Mono efforts aside)

Re:This would help

[XaXXon]

Please don't forget that utorrent requires Windows to run.

uTorrent is NOT self-contained. It requires the Windows API to run. This part of its footprint is not shown when you look at its memory usage, but that first 256MB of RAM that windows uses is the reason uTorrent looks so small.

Re:This would help

[Hooya]

you are correct. but whatever we saved using java to get the project started, we have already spent trying to figure out why, oh, why java croaks on OutOfMemoryException when we have more than 8G of ram most of which is not being used.

on a more philosophical level, there is already an excellent VM that *can* use all the 8G and then some. it's called linux. using java to build apps because it's easy to program in is like using tonka trucks because those trucks are so much easier to handle than the real thing. after all, why pay commercial driver rates to drive a multi ton truck when you can get you own kids (for free) to 'drive' the tonka trucks.

i learned java back around '95, '96 and was really excited about it then. but after having used it on some really large projects, i have been really really disappointed and came to the conclusion that the only real contribution of the JVM was a serious neutering to most modern advances in the OS.

forget portable programming languages - use a portable OS - linux. and forget the V, use the M (tm).

anyhow, Guy Steel was right. i am looking at lisp right now (mostly for emacs tho).

Re:Third-Party JVM

[Call Me Black Cloud]

People must be tired to mod you up. Performance isn't really an issue anymore and hasn't been for a couple of years. Blaming any perceived slowness on Swing is like saying C++ is slow because of Windows overhead. Most Java code doesn't make use of Swing (think server-side). As for the "122 ms", well, you just made that up.

Other problems with your post: Eclipse is an application; Swing is a language feature. A Smalltalk derivative (Squeak) is not a suitable replacement for Java. I'd go so far as to say Ruby and Python aren't either, though both are very powerful and are better suited to some tasks than Java.

Nice try at a troll...subtly nonsensical.

Re:This would help

[icebattle]

"1. Restrictive licenses make it more difficult to reasonably deploy than any competing technology in a linux environment."

Pretty meaningless comment, unless you can supply some examples. I've done consulting and development for a number of large, lawyer heavy organizations, and none of them had a problem deploying Java solutions on linux. None.

"2. JVM is fat fat fat, it uses way more RAM than is reasonable."

Sadly uninformed, probably due to severe lack of experience with large applications. Per example, a couple of years ago I worked in a team that bid on and developed an application that, in a nutshell, receives up to 20Megs per sec of market data, breaks it up into itty-bitty messages, and then makes it available to any number of subscribing clients. Call it a proxy, if you will. We developed the app in pure Java, using the new NIO functionality. We competed with another team who started out in C, moved to C++ midway through, and were barely in a position to go alplha when we were ready to deploy. The client, since they were paying and had a lot of anti-Java staff, insisted on waiting, even though the delivery date had long since passed. When they finally had something to show, the apps were launched on identical hardware, and allowed to run 24/7. Our app ran smoothly, uninterrupted (except for a blown network interface) for the duration of the test. The other team had to restart their app several times a day, resulting in unnacceptable outages. Their restart time was, likewise, poor. Their app required 2Gigs to run. Ours ran happily under a Gig.

The client paid both teams for their efforts, then licensed our solution.

So, my quesion then is, where's the fat?

Re:This would help

[TrekCycling]

All of this is terribly ironic to me. I've worked with Java for about 6 years now. It's considered the Enterprise Open Source solution (because admin types typically confuse open source with "free and runs on lots of platforms) usually. So it's either Java or Microsoft in every shop I've ever worked for. No PHP. No Ruby. And often Java is paired up with Linux, MySQL, etc. So I find it funny (although I understand the point, but it's still funny) that people consider Java to be so difficult because it's closed source. In every shop where Microsoft is the choice, the decision is usually made because the stack is predictable. It's predictable because Microsoft controls every aspect of it from the database to the app server to the language you use to code on it. So open sourcing Java would probably have the unintended consequence of giving Java a perception problem in the eyes of manager types. It would become risky on the same level as Linux and MySQL and so instead of being the safe, "adult" part of that crazy open source stack, it would just become one more piece of it. Albeit a powerful one, but it would probably push more people into the arms of Microsoft. Sorry, but that's been my experience, given what I've witnessed in the industry lately.

Re:This would help

[IntlHarvester]

Problem with this argument is that almost nobody runs Windows just to use uTorrent, while quite a lot of people run Java just for Azureus. The resources required for Windows are used by all applications (*including Java*), but most desktop users only infrequently use Java apps.

Re:This would help

[chthon]

I have the impression that the last couple of months I see more people on Slashdot mentioning Common Lisp as a replacement for Java.

Re:Third-Party JVM

[LarsWestergren]

The other main problem is Checked Exceptions, which force a programmer to write "try{" before the body of every method and "} catch (Exception e) {}"

No, not EVERY method. Just methods that that can reasonably fail (for instance I/O related operations), and that doesn't "know" how to handle the problem themselves. This helps you create well defined APIs, which in my opinion is one major reason there are so many frameworks and open source projects for Java.

Although relatively useless (if not harmful), these checked exceptions lead to a minimum of 122 extra CPU cycles per method invocation.

Evidence of this? Besides, it has been said so many times, but appearently it has to be said again. Processing cycles keep getting cheaper. Programmer hours keep getting more expensive. Trading a few cycles for a feature that helps you create more stable and transparent code is sensible.

catch (Exception e) {}

That is just about the worst thing you can write. Ok, maybe catch(Throwable t) {} is worse. That the first editions of Bruce Eckels Thinking in Java books were littered with those is evidence he just doesn't get checked exceptions.

Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license

[houghi]

That is the reason that with SUSE you can decide yourself wether or not you use it or not. e.g. for the upcoming 10.1 version the CD1-5 are pure OSS. There is an additional CD6 that will hold the non-OSS stuff, like Opera and Java.

That way SUSE lies the choice with the user, not with the distribution. If the user still decides to use it (and many will) they still have all the advantages as they have with the different other packages that are included with SUSE, including security updates.

Re:This would help

[IDontLinkMondays]

Can't speak on the licensing, I'd say that the technology itself however is the complication in deployment. Java has a tremendous number of rough edges and that is was is the problem.

Now, before I take a moment to rag on your ridiculous RAM comment, let me assure you that I hate Java from that ground up. I find it to be little more than a virus.

JVM is thin thin thin. The fact is that most non-Sun implementations of the JVM are tight and small. In fact, from a performance perspective, Java is typically superior to compiled languages because of how it handles RAM. Before you blow me off, let me justify my comment. Thanks to the Java license and NDA agreements, I in fact can not say where I learned this information, but I have extensive experience in this topic since I was forced for extended periods to suffer the Java VM on embedded devices.

Java is a relatively simplistic (though strangley complete to the point of OVER KILL!!!) architecture/language/etc... It provides a language matched to a virtual machine matched to a set of somewhat poorly written libraries.

What makes Java superior to compiled languages is that it compensates for several key factors. First I'll refine my definition of a compiled language to clearly specify C/C++/Pascal/other non-garbage collected languages.

1) Application Developers are not System Developers
Using C++ as an example, most application developers use the standard implementation of new and delete. This is fine, but the first thing to keep in mind is that memory allocation for a C++ application that makes use of a lot of small objects tend to pay a huge performance price. C developers regularly shoot down the performance of C++ without realizing that it's the limitation in the C allocation routines.

Object oriented programming is typically very heap intensive. In many cases, developers insist on iterating through strings and lists far too much. Students are even taught in the university that data structures should be used absolutely everywhere. Of course they are taught Big-O and Little-O, but unless you're actually implementing the data structure classes and types, very little importance is placed on performance of these classes.

Strings are abused regularly since even though the allocation unit size of the heap allocator is limited to blocks of 16 bytes (for example), programmers will actually reallocate the buffer for a string to resize it from 8 to 9 bytes in length. By reallocating, I mean they will in fact allocate a new 9 byte string, then copy the original to the new buffer and delete the original buffer.

Application developers pay very little attention to the actual internal mechanics of the classes and functions which they use. To a certain extent, I can forgive them since an application developer is expected to think differently than a system developer. When we depend on system developers to write applications, they're often extremely fast, but relatively unusable.

So here's where Java shines, because of the garbage collection system and because of the relocatable memory architecture, memory is managed in such a way which decreases the cycles spent in allocation and deallocation of buffers. A well written JVM actually will actually either when necessary or when time is available compress the heap to maximize performance and minimize heap consumption.

So although Java seems like a memory hog, it's actually not that bad given the number of allocations and deallocations being performed by the developers. Sadly, the extreme memory use you're talking about is related to the poor system level development skills of application developers stacked on the additional layer which abstracts even more from the developer therefore making it less practical for the developer to understand the internals of the system.

2) System Developers make Terrible Applications
A system developer is typically biased towards raw high level languages such as C (not C++) because their used to making use of the stack whereever po

Re:This would help

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmer time is much more expensive than processor time these days. Therefore, many current programming languages are optimised to save programmer time first. C and C++ were designed in a time when processor cycles were extremely expensive, and therefore are optimised to save time at runtime instead.

As you have seen, java typically gets you results more quickly than C. In this case, since you simply took less time to get to your basic functionality, you could take more time to think about how to code more efficiently, and ended up actually writing faster code in the end.

However, java is not the only modern programming language out there. People have designed several new languages in the past decade. It seems reasonable to assume that some of those people deliberately set out to improve on java. Compared to such languages, java might appear to be very inefficient.

I'll leave it up to you to compare and decide. For instance, here's a comparison for web applications, done at JPL. (YMMV):

http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov

Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license

[Bastard of Subhumani]

If Sun were to GPL Java, it would be unstoppable.

Java programs already run for ever.

Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license

[afd8856]

You may not realize, but "libraries are the new language". Seriousely, what good is a cool language if you have to reinvent the wheel everytime you want to have something like a report printer with print preview - a bit upset on python, with which I'm fighting right now to get something nice for a business app, I would really like something like jasper reports for python. Drawing on the DC with wx sucks for more then one form, and using reportlab to generate pdfs sucks as well. I've settled on doing a mono-platform hack, generating html with simpletal and calling its print preview dialog through ActiveX.

Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license

[Haeleth]

In order to be allowed to use the trademarked term "Open Source" however, whatever license they choose must (a) comply with the Open Source Definition, and (b) be approved by the Open Source Initiative.

Did you even read the pages you were linking to? The Open Source Initiative's own certification page, that you linked to, has this to say, right in the first paragraph: "the term 'open source' itself [...] can't be protected as a trademark".

I can call anything I like Open Source, and nobody can do a thing to stop me. The new Evil Proprietary License (a viral license that infects any software in the same room with a deadly curse that can only be lifted by the sacrifice of your firstborn) could be called Open Source. What it couldn't legally be called is OSI Certified(tm).