Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time

snydeq (1272828) writes Java core has stagnated, Java EE is dead, and Spring is over, but the JVM marches on. C'mon Oracle, where are the big ideas? asks Andrew C. Oliver. 'I don't think Oracle knows how to create markets. It knows how to destroy them and create a product out of them, but it somehow failed to do that with Java. I think Java will have a long, long tail, but the days are numbered for it being anything more than a runtime and a language with a huge install base. I don't see Oracle stepping up to the plate to offer the kind of leadership that is needed. It just isn't who Oracle is. Instead, Oracle will sue some more people, do some more shortsighted and self-defeating things, then quietly fade into runtime maintainer before IBM, Red Hat, et al. pick up the slack independently. That's started to happen anyhow.'

Comments

Nobody kills Java

[Sla$hPot]

Quote me on it in twenty years!

Re:Nobody kills Java

[bobbied]

Hey, COBOL still lives... Sorta

Re:Nobody kills Java

[gl4ss]

yeah.

" for it being anything more than a runtime and a language with a huge install base." makes me confused. why the heck would it be something else? what does he want? he wants them to brand some operating system as JavaOS or what the fuck?

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Android/JavaOS/g
Oracle.add($$$$)

Re:Nobody kills Java

[gstoddart]

I think the problem is Oracle isn't innovating, isn't advancing the technology, some aspects of it are essentially dead, the Java Community Process is largely ignored ...

Java is moving along under its own intertia, but as stewards of the technology, Oracle isn't really doing a damned thing with it.

They're doing exactly what you expect a company like Oracle to do ... maintain the status quo, fail to innovate, and rest on their laurels.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Sla$hPot]

Yep and for one reason, one word. Banks.
And they love Java. So Java stays.
Java browser applet will go surely.
But thats an other story.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Jaime2]

"runtime and a language with a huge install base" describes a future where Java just coasts. By contrast, Python, Ruby, and .Net are all runtimes and languages (several languages in the case of .Net) with a huge install base that are actively introducing new frameworks, development tools, and feature on a regular basis. I'm calling an interpreter a runtime for the purposes of this conversation.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorta? If you have a home mortgage in the US, I can say for a fact that you've got a 50/50 chance of using COBOL every month.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[idontgno]

So, what you're saying is that Oracle's stagnant "sit on it" leadership is bad for people for whom the language and runtime are the end, the product, the point of it all.

As opposed to in the real world, in which the language and runtime are just tools to get shit done, and its users want stability.

You don't have to guess which community Oracle cares about. But if you're not sure, ask yourself which community can Oracle extort support contracts out of, or can be upsold on other products.

Follow the money. How much is the JCP paying Oracle to give a rat's ass about their concerns? Innovation is a cost center to someone protecting a market share, and competing against others who are protecting a market share.

If you want novelty, go find it someplace else. The other posters comparing Java to COBOL, even if jokingly, are very nearly right. Especially if you stipulate that, at the time of COBOL's dominance, the primary implementation of COBOL was associated with IBM big iron.

And that's your historical analogue of the day: COBOL was to IBM what Java is to Oracle.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Dcnjoe60]

Sorta? If you have a home mortgage in the US, I can say for a fact that you've got a 50/50 chance of using COBOL every month.

And if you pay taxes, at least in the US, there is a better than 80% chance of COBOL being involved.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[jythie]

He probably wants "Innovation", you know, change for the sake of change? Taking something that works and making new partly incompatible versions of it so that it does not have the taint of old and uncool.

Besides, who would want to work on a stable platform where all the major library needs have been met and vetted when one can be on the bleeding edge of something new to show off?

Re:Nobody kills Java

[westlake]

ask yourself which community can Oracle extort support contracts out of

If support contracts count as extortion than open source development is in big trouble.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Lonewolf666]

You don't have to guess which community Oracle cares about. But if you're not sure, ask yourself which community can Oracle extort support contracts out of, or can be upsold on other products.

Follow the money. How much is the JCP paying Oracle to give a rat's ass about their concerns? Innovation is a cost center to someone protecting a market share, and competing against others who are protecting a market share.

At the moment, lawyers seem to be a bigger cost center in protecting Java market share. See Oracle vs. Google, still ongoing.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Tridus]

This is all about your definition of "dead". COBOL is "dead" in the sense that it's not being developed, it's not generally taught, and it's not generally used.

It's "not dead" in the sense that some people are still using it to do meaningful work.

The number of dead languages will vary considerably based on which definition of "dead" you use.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Infiniti2000]

That's true, but there's a difference between an open source support contract and the way in which Oracle does a support contract.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[SQLGuru]

I thought lawyers were a profit center based on the statement regarding all of the lawsuits........

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Eravnrekaree]

Complete nonsense. New upgrades have been carried out for COBOL, including COBOL 2002 which adds objects. There are several actively developed COBOL implementations. I think COBOL is more useful and available than its ever been.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[SpzToid]

Cobol is nothing; have you heard the latest about FORTRAN and Big Data?

http://developers.slashdot.org...

Re:Nobody kills Java

[morgauxo]

That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

They are also doing their best to kill the alternatives to the ORACLE JDK, the OpenJDK which iirc Sun announced as new reference implementation has yet to get an official Java 8 release while talk already moves towards Java 9. JavaFX which officially deprecated Swing somewhere around Java 7 is also limited to the ORACLE JDK (since its release with OpenJDK 8 still didn't happen), it is also buggy as hell.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, but Android uses Java syntax and there aren't many other options for crossplatform programming with a large enough install base to matter. Java has its issues, but there isn't a whole lot of competition for what it does at the present.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[ADRA]

I think you missed the half-decade under Sun's stuardship where Java moved quite slowly between 1.2 -> 1.5. A language evolves to suit its community, and if it doesn't shove out the latest buzz word to the populace immediately, then I'm fine with it as long as they get to it eventually. Most library based tools have been out years before Sun/Oracle decided to standardize on a given set, which is 100% FINE. Let the trail blazers blaze trails and the standards follow. The aternative is building OSI model or maybe X.500 and expecting the world to change for them. Let a dozen interesting implementations develop and then combine the best parts of a few into the 'defacto' implementaion.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Scary part is Fortran standards are still being developed.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[ShanghaiBill]

That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!

Really? My impression is that Slashdot is mostly geezers.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Unknown1337]

I can say for a fact that you've got a 50/50 chance

I don't mean to be picky, but this statement deviates as far as you can from instilling confidence or stating a fact. This equates to "definitely might", "100% maybe", "completely possible" or <insert your favourite overly supported flip-flop statement here>. While I certainly don't doubt COBOLs use in the banking system; unsubstantiated 'facts' are merely opinions. Java is embedded in everything these days and large companies hate change. While its evolution will probably cease to exist in the near future, Java isn't going anywhere.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[bobbied]

FORTRAN has it's place, it's just not usually my tool of choice.

I programed in a language called ATLAS once a long time ago.... Now THAT is dead, as is Vulcan, the OS it ran on. (He's dead Jim)....

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Frobnicator]

Besides, who would want to work on a stable platform where all the major library needs have been met and vetted when one can be on the bleeding edge of something new to show off?

It is nothing to be too concerned about, it is part of the normal life cycle.

Like happens to all languages before it, Java has slowly changed from a lean and sexy system into an overweight, middle-aged, sometimes nagging system that is not really much to look at. While it is great to have around, cooks great meals, and keeps the house clean, it is not attractive any more.

Nothing to be ashamed of.

Systems get older. Usually they get less attractive as they age and stop attracting people.

Java was once that lean and sexy system when compared to its contemporaries. I was there when C++ was lean and sexy compared to predecessors. I remember hearing stories about C being lean and sexy compared to needing to rewrite the program for every system.

Lots of new languages are popping up that are new and sexy. Dart and Go and Boo languages are all cute (and are mature enough that people don't look away and mumble 'tsk tsk'). Apple's new Swift language looks cute but is still a bit too young. While I have a lot of code in Java, I'm not married to the language and can use them as they appeal to me.

Now for my rambling "get off my lawn" story. Stop reading here if you don't want to listen to grandpa babble about his old conquests and drift into a drooling sleep.

I first started playing with C++ around 1985. It was so easy to create systems compared to the C systems I was also working on. I could modify behavior really easy with inheritance. I didn't need to specify my structure on every single function, just use the fancy new member functions that passed it automatically with the this pointer. Function names were much simpler, instead of the format NounVerbNoun they could be reduced to VerbNoun or just Verb. So much less typing. I didn't need to maintain tables of function pointers inside every object. I didn't need to follow every allocation with a series of intialization statements, but throw them into a constructor. I didn't need to search the entire code base and make hundreds of changes when adding something to a structure, I could just modify a single file. It was wonderful. But over time people kept adding new requirements and best practices; when you do this you also need to do five other things. Build times radically increased as features like templates were added (they were not there originally) and then huge swaths of code was automatically generated at runtime, or hundreds or even thousands of potential types were evaluated as potentially deduced types. It slowly changed from young and sexy to old and ugly.

I first started programming with Java back in the 1.1 days, around 1996. It was so easy compared to the C++ systems I was also working on. I could create a good looking graphical program that I could run from a web page in a matter of minutes, or hours at most. My first real project at the time was a distributed image processing tool, with back-end clients running on 12 machines and a coordinating server, and the whole project took less than a week. If I needed to build a similar tool in C++ at the time it would have taken five or ten times the effort. Being able to simply rely on java.net.* rather than trying to find a networking library, relying on java.awt.Image classes to process the work, and otherwise having everything instantly available made development very easy. I could dynamically build images and pass them over the web with a trivial amount of human effort.

Today I could still do that, but it would upset people. I would be asked things like "Why doesn't it use Maven to build it? Why don't I use more advanced image processing packages? Why are these talking directly with network libraries rather than using a comprehensive REST-based system? Why is there no comprehensive unit testing?" All the little additions have crept

Re:Nobody kills Java

[gabereiser]

OpenJDK has JavaFX, it's called OpenJFX... is it complete, no, is it enough to start? sure. Oracle doesn't give a shit about java, they only wanted the patents.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[angel'o'sphere]

You would be surprised how many banks, insurances and transportation companies still use COBOL. Or are running legacy COBOL applications ...
And your claim that it is not actively developed is plain wrong.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Jaime2]

There's a lot of room for improvement in programming languages. New features aren't just novelty. The database/language impedance mismatch is still pretty big, language feature to support multithreading are still weak, strongly typed languages still need to handle "dynamic-ness" better. Microsoft has done a great job of introducing new features that people actually want while still maintaining backwards compatibility. Oracle is being way too conservative here and it does matter to their customers - even the big ones.

I spent a lot of time recently working at a fortune 20 company. Java was the official programming language of the company, but the Enterprise Architecture group was starting to lean closer to .Net when I left.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[mendax]

I think the problem is Oracle isn't innovating, isn't advancing the technology, some aspects of it are essentially dead, the Java Community Process is largely ignored ..

And Sun was innovating the Java platform? How long did it take them to implement closures and lambda expressions? When did Microsoft implement them in C#? Groovy, the scripting language that was intended to be a "groovier Java" had them from the beginning. I was at the Java One when Sun announced that they would be added in Java 7. Well, that didn't happen. Java 7 was simply lame.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

> So, what you're saying is that Oracle's stagnant "sit on it" leadership is bad for people for whom the language and runtime are the end, the product, the point of it all.

Yes, for the people who are making the language, it is the end product...

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the other half.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[blackiner]

And apparently the API, considering they have successfully sued Google for implementing their own version of Java.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[number6x]

Cobol had an ANSI standard object oriented implementation before C++ did. C++ was born as an object oriented language, but took a long time to publish an ANSI standard version. This does matter for certain industries who care about support and stability. That is part of the reason why banking, insurance and manufacturing industries still use 'dead' languages like COBOL and C so much more than other languages.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[gabereiser]

indeed.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Dogtanian]

Java browser applet will go surely.

How often do you see Java browser applets used anyway? Not that much, because they never really took off in the first place (despite being by far the most hyped aspect of Java when it first came out in the mid-90s).

Yeah, you do see them used sometimes for banking applications, custom internal-use corporate tools and the like, but for general use Java Applets were massively outnumbered by Flash apps.

In fact, I'd say that Flash on web pages ended up almost entirely fulfilling the general-purpose embedded code role that Java Applets were originally meant- but failed- to fill.

The problem was that Java was just too heavyweight and slow for computers of the time, whereas Flash was more lightweight- having started out as little more than an interactive animation creator- its increasing capabilities better matching slowly-improving computer power.

I wouldn't say that Flash stole that market from Java, because the latter had already had a run at it (during the mid-to-late 90s) and failed to take off by the time that Flash started growing up around the turn of the millennium.

Obviously it's in decline now, but Flash had at least ten- and probably closer to fifteen- years at the top, whereas Java Applets never took off in the first place.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

COBOL was to IBM what Java is to Oracle.

OH? Java data has Oracle up all night reeling? And if it isn't then the white shirts are on the next plane?

Re:Nobody kills Java

[excelsior_gr]

Their laurels? Come on...

Java was made what it is by Sun. Oracle just bought them and expected everything they touch to turn to gold. That is a hell of a rotten bed of laurels they are resting on...

Re:Nobody kills Java

[techfilz]

And Java is the new COBOL : verbose language, large install base, mainly corporate users, bored developers...

Re:Nobody kills Java

[themusicgod1]

There's no "sorta" about it. COBOL was still being *actively developed in* as late as 2013. People are going to be supporting COBOL for generations at this rate.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Sla$hPot]

Yeah, you do see them used sometimes for banking applications

Thats enough already. Especially because the vast amount of users, plus the constant exploits and security updates
Speaking of Flash. JavaScript can handle web applications much better today than Java applets and Flash

Obviously it's in decline now, but Flash had at least ten- and probably closer to fifteen- years at the top, whereas Java Applets never took off in the first place

Thats true for the web, but Java as a language, has a much larger code base than Flash.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[bobbied]

There's no "sorta" about it. COBOL was still being *actively developed in* as late as 2013. People are going to be supporting COBOL for generations at this rate.

No, COBOL isn't dead, but the burial plot has been paid for, the grave stone ordered, the undertaker paid, and the hole is being dug. We are just waiting for it to stop breathing so the doctor can sigh the paperwork. Which is why I put "sorta" on that post.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Cobol is out there. Many State governments are still on Cobol.

Java has some areas where it excels. Some components like Swing go by the wayside and JavaFX to replace it. Many more examples. Curious JavaFX will make it.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[IamTheRealMike]

I think the problem is Oracle isn't innovating, isn't advancing the technology, some aspects of it are essentially dead, the Java Community Process is largely ignored ...

Eh, this wasn't my experience so far.

There are many things that suck about Oracle, but so far what I've seen is that they've increased investment in Java, they're resolving a lot of basic, every day problems people face when writing regular apps and overall Java is getting a lot better. There sure was a time when Java stagnated .... when Sun owned it. Now? Well, Java 8 resolves a lot of the more irritating problems with the language (lambdas make a huge difference, even though they're just syntax sugar), but more importantly the Java team have accepted that the real language innovation will happen with other languages that target the JVM and they've got serious about making the JVM a multi-language runtime. For example, in Java 7 they did a lot of work to support dynamic languages and in Java 8 they built on that work to make a fast Javascript implementation on the JVM. It's not as fast as V8 at the moment but it's certainly a respectable showing. Meanwhile Scala, Clojure, Kotlin etc are busy creating the next-gen languages that the Java team is too conservative to tackle.

With respect to community involvement, I don't personally give a shit about some "community process". What I care about is: can I check the sources out of version control, email the developers with a question and get a response the same day? Can I file bugs and have them be fixed? My experience with the JavaFX component of the OpenJDK is yes yes and yes. In fact I've kind of been blown away by how responsive the JFX team are. Right now I'd say they've got a great UI toolkit (easily as good as Cocoa), but it only got good in the last couple of years, so they're relatively unknown and as a result you get fantastic service - for free!

Most importantly the JavaFX team aren't trying to create some uber-platform that replaces the operating system. They've built a tool that bundles the JVM and creates native installers/DMGs/packages for each platform. Finally you can use Java as if it were just a big library. No applets, no Web Start, no fucking about - just make an app that looks normal to your users, but shares 99.9% of the code across platforms. Which is what it always promised.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[david_thornley]

As far as I can tell, COBOL's first O-O standard was the 2002 one. C++ became an ISO (and ANSI) standard in 1998. As far as I can tell, the first object-oriented language to be an ANSI standard was Common Lisp in (IIRC) 1991.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[roman_mir]

All of the complaints about Java (and I have my own) actually show that it is not the language or the runtime that is annoying to use, it is people that are now in it who are annoying like hell.

In my company I dictate the rules of how we code and we use the bare minimum that needs to be used at any moment in time and no more than that. Basically make it as simple as possible to achieve your goal but not simpler than that.

Given this, I prevent people here from using newer syntactic sugar that was added from about version 1.5 (with minor variations), I prevent people from using gigantic libraries, where a tiny method would do the trick without adding 50 million classes and processors and factories and configuration files.

Simplicity and standardisation of code in terms of structure and of process and data flow is the key to being able to release a project successfully into production (at least when it comes to a small team working on large, complex projects).

One thing that we use here that I built and we develop further that TRULY ads value to coding, reduces time it takes to create a new piece of code that can be added to the project is code generation. I built a number of code generators and put them into a single tool that we now have online and it takes a page of Meta Data and provides 80% of code for a standard use case. This includes database code, stubbing for business logic delegates, front end action and form and bean code, jsps even with some rudimentary HTML in it. Our code generators produce vertical stacks, use cases that can be generated from a page of meta code and imported into the project, modified for an hour and become part of the project. This reduces amount of time something like that takes from 4-5 days (with debugging and possible bugs) to 2-4 hours.

This just may be what is actually needed - helping developers to create standard use cases and import them into existing or new projects rather than developing 5 more ways to write the same 'for' loop.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Dogtanian]

Yeah, you do see them used sometimes for banking applications

Thats enough already. Especially because the vast amount of users, plus the constant exploits and security updates

AFAICT the last time my Windows installation was infected it was via Java. Currently I don't have it installed, and haven't missed it.

Speaking of Flash. JavaScript can handle web applications much better today than Java applets and Flash

I suspect that the majority of remaining client-side Java apps around today have legacy origins.

As I acknowledged, Flash *is* quite clearly on the way out now- something that probably started with Apple not supporting it on the iPhone, and isn't helped by issues with other smartphones and low-powered tablets.

Combined with the fact that JavaScript, HTML and the infrastructure supporting both is far more mature than it was 15 years ago, ditching Flash is now quite doable.

So what you say *is* true nowadays, but it wasn't always the case.

Thats true for the web, but Java as a language, has a much larger code base than Flash.

Maybe so, but it *was* specifically client-side web-based Applets I was talking about.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[osu-neko]

That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!

Really? My impression is that Slashdot is mostly geezers.

Being geezers and wearing diapers are not mutually exclusive.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[osu-neko]

Old languages never die, they just stop being hyped.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

>So, what you're saying is that Oracle's stagnant "sit on it" leadership is bad for people for whom the language and runtime are the end, the product, the point of it all.

Programming language evolution hasn't stopped but Java's evolution has slowed to a crawl. To point out the blindingly obvious, that sure as hell is going to matter to "people for whom the language and runtime are the end, the product, the point of it all". What's your answer to that, hm?

Re: Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

You're SO awesome! Your developers get to run your config code and never solve real problems for themselves.

Give me a break. Let's stay in the 90s forever with our Java version and our coding practices.
Let's cast out that evil syntactic sugar and write one XML file to rule them all.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[sproketboy]

Seriously insightful for this tripe? I'm not even bothering to list Java 8 features here cause you're too fucken inbred retareded to understand them anyway ruby boy.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of C, and I could count on one hand the number of times I've had to implement or use a method dispatch table. And those were so basic that only did I ever wish I had used C++.

Inheritable class hierarchies and type interfaces should be the last resort for management of complexity. I also write in many other languages, and I rarely use inheritance elsewhere, either. If you want to avoid spaghetti dependencies, it's easier and saner to just proxy the function call, rather than trying to rely on method inheritance.

Inheritance and user-defined type interfaces are just one form of modularization, and it's not a great one at that except for _very_ specific data encapsulation tasks. But when you're munging huge amounts of typed data (usually large business or research data sets) there are much better languages to use than C, C++, or Java. Those are infrastructure languages; the things you use to build domain-specific tools which you then, in turn, program in to process the data.

Perl was the goto choice back in the 80s and 90s. Now people use Ruby, Python, Javascript, or some other language that offers a lot more in the way of convenience when jugging strings and numbers. (Because we're not in an OOP-in-the-silicon utopia yet, data still means strings and numbers.) Unsurprisingly all of those tools are written in either C, C++, or Java.

The same reason class hierarchies don't work well is the same reason that the Semantic Web never materialized. It's simply not practical to rigorously break down mountains of data into strongly-typed ontologies which are then laboriously described in a programming language. Once you drill that into your skull, life becomes sooooo much easier.

Gawd, how many endless nights did I waste as a young engineer carefully designing strongly-typed, inheritable interfaces. 99.9% of that work was for naught. As I was never given the gift of clairvoyance my interfaces were never sufficient, no matter how generic I made them or how deep I made class hierarchy in my vein attempt to capture all the possibilities. At the end of day grep, vim, and some regular expressions are infinitely more practical when you need to incorporate some unforeseen behavior, although in the vast majority of cases those blunt instruments are completely unnecessary.

I can't believe in 2014 people still wallow in that mentality, especially someone with your experience. It's ridiculous. I know they still teach this crap in school (although not when we were in school), but yeesh.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[VortexCortex]

Eventually your system will either collect enough entropy that it will suck ass and die -- OR, you'll pull your head from your anus, implement a meta complier that generates code in Java or C or whatever flavor of the month, decouple your business from any single platform's destiny, and survive into the future.

Yes, code generation is key. That's what compilers are: Machine code generators -- but not shitty incomplete code generators that have no full language of their own. That's the difference between Java or a Meta Compiler or C or your POS garbage that no one understands but you.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Archtech]

In about 1990 Gartner estimated that there were over 100 billion lines of COBOL in commercial use. By 2003, that had become 180 billion lines. Extrapolating, I'd expect that the figure is over 250 billion lines today. It's rather like the IBM mainframe, whose "death" was being loudly trumpeted in the early 1990s. Yet mainframe sales went right on growing, and today more of them are being used than ever. Most of them probably run COBOL applications.

What you need to decide is what software is for. If it's for fun, an art form, or a fashionable vehicle of self-expression, then by all means go with the latest and greatest languages, frameworks, and tools. But if it's a business-critical (or even safety-critical) component of vital engineering systems, doesn't it make sense to use something that is *known* to work reliably? "A legacy application is one that works", and I for one prefer to fly in aircraft that are programmed with Ada and use banks whose computers run COBOL. Call me a boring old fuddy-duddy, but some things are just better if you can count on them working.

http://scs.senecac.on.ca/~timo...

Re:Nobody kills Java

[phantomfive]

Today I could still do that, but it would upset people. I would be asked things like "Why doesn't it use Maven to build it? Why don't I use more advanced image processing packages? Why are these talking directly with network libraries rather than using a comprehensive REST-based system? Why is there no comprehensive unit testing?" All the little additions have crept in to the process making it just as time consuming --- if not more --- than C++ was at the time I picked up Java. That makes it no longer lean and sexy, more of an overbearing source of frustration.

I would invite you to come over and work with me......we have plenty of more direct programming. If you don't need a layer, don't use it.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

"As opposed to in the real world, in which the language and runtime are just tools to get shit done"

MigLayout lets you get shit done (by hand). Springlayout lets you get shit done by hand *if* you have infinite time. Some of the other included layoutmanagers let you get a lot of shit done if you have a visual gui builder (gui gui builder?) but the autogenerated code is rarely nice. The rest of the inclued layoutmanagers are a chapter in a learn to java book.

And despite this MigLayout is still not included in java (attempts to get it included dating back to 2007).

Re:Nobody kills Java

[DuckDodgers]

Oracle was evil to do that, but Google could have prevented it and they didn't. Sun was failing before being bought by Oracle, and they tried to negotiate a licensing agreement with Google for Java but failed. If Google had waved half a billion dollars at Sun and said "Here's a one time fee if you make Java an open standard", the current mess would have never happened. Sun probably still would have folded or been acquired eventually, but Android - and Apache Harmony, and gcj would be legally in the clear and the latter two would be actively developed instead of mostly dead.

Re: Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, did you just call c a dead language?

Re:Nobody kills Java

[sydbarrett74]

Sounds like your ideas on development are just as atavistic and misguided as the ones you have regarding economics. I see a trend here.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[petteyg359]

You ever heard of that big payroll company called ADP? They use a Java 6 applet (one that refuses to run if you even have vague thoughts about installing JRE 7 or 8) for their time card software. Lots of big companies outsource their payroll to ADP, therefore lots of big companies are still using Java applets as a core function of their business.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[gwolf]

Yes, the hole was dug 25 years ago, the grave stone ordered 23 years ago, the undertaker paid 20 years ago. But the hole has got filled with leaves, which had a lot of time to be composted into new ground. The undertaker died two years ago. The grave stone shows signes of decay. And COBOL is happily breathing.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Dogtanian]

You ever heard of that big payroll company called ADP? They use a Java 6 applet (one that refuses to run if you even have vague thoughts about installing JRE 7 or 8) for their time card software. Lots of big companies outsource their payroll to ADP, therefore lots of big companies are still using Java applets as a core function of their business.

Nothing I said contradicts that. Quite the opposite; I'd say that *was* pretty much the sort of niche use acknowledged in my original post:-

you do see them used sometimes for banking applications, custom internal-use corporate tools and the like

But the main point- already expressed- was that

for general use [emphasis added] Java Applets were massively outnumbered by Flash apps.

In terms of pure numbers, there were (and still are, even now) vastly more embedded Flash apps and programs on web pages in general than there ever were Java Applets.

Incidentally, the fact that you mentioned it requires the superseded Java 6 would seem to back up my suspicion expressed elsewhere that many such apps are essentially legacy products.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[petteyg359]

Nothing I said contradicts that.

So, when you said this:

How often do you see Java browser applets used anyway? Not that much,

you didn't say that?

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

I really liked reading your comment. I liked java more when it just had variables, functions, and objects. No generics, lambdas, or other garbage.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like your main beef is not that Java has become annoying to use, but that actual engineering discipline has become the norm. It's not "artistic" anymore.

It's the difference between drafting and drawing - not nearly as sexy, not nearly as fun, but absolutely necessary. There are a lot of problems in software where the cost of failure ranges from human fatalities to the destruction of entire economies.

The 'hip' crowd has always gravitated to the artistic, while the engineer remains dull and boring.

Fortunately, the 'hip' crowd tends to shed their adolescence and lose their illusion of invincibility as they slowly learn that reality has a way of making them pay dearly for overlooking details.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Dogtanian]

Good grief.

If one goes back and reads my original post, it's acknowledged quite clearly that Java Applets still enjoy *niche* usage for banking and internal-usage business tools but as far as the web in general is concerned, Java Applets are vastly outnumbered by embedded Flash.

I appreciate that you're trying to win an argument by disingenuous pedantry and taking isolated phrases out of context, but the meaning is quite clear to anyone who isn't trying to use it solely as an attempt at point-scoring.

Re:Nobody kills Java

[arglebargle_xiv]

The number of dead languages will vary considerably based on which definition of "dead" you use.

Quod dixerit ad illum, infantem!

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing "niche" about ADP. I appreciate that you're trying to win an argument through character attacks, but...

Re:Nobody kills Java

[Dogtanian]

it's acknowledged quite clearly that Java Applets still enjoy *niche* usage for banking and internal-usage business tools

There's nothing "niche" about ADP.

As the post you're replying to makes clear, the "niche" referred to is that of "banking and internal-usage business tools" relative to the number of web-based apps and programs as a whole, and not to ADP's relative position within the former.

ADP may be a big fish within the moderately-sized lake of banking and corporate apps, but that lake is still tiny compared to the ocean of endless Flash apps and games aimed at 10-year-olds et al.

Oracle Forms

[Dynamoo]

Oracle Forms is dependent on Java.. but it seems very version-sensitive. Updating Java can often break forms, despite both being Oracle products.

Other than that, the only use I can see for Java on the desktop is to enable machines to get infected with malware.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft. That's the only reason I'd install Java. The browser plugin needs to go though.

Re:Oracle Forms

[stonedead]

Oracle Forms is visual basic on steroids, only more painful to develop. 90s tech and still we are using it, god help us.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Njorthbiatr]

Oracle Forms is visual basic on steroids, only more painful to develop. 90s tech and still we are using it, god help us.

QFTFT We have C# now people. You can quit living in the stone age. It's like Java, only not terrible.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

"only not terrible" [citation needed]

Re:Oracle Forms

[0123456]

It's like Java, only not terrible.

And only runs on Windows.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Dcnjoe60]

Oracle Forms is visual basic on steroids, only more painful to develop. 90s tech and still we are using it, god help us.

QFTFT

We have C# now people. You can quit living in the stone age. It's like Java, only not terrible.

That's fine if you live in a Windows only .Net world, but not everybody does. And while there is Mono, it is not 100% compatible.

Re:Oracle Forms

[jythie]

But I thought we were replacing PCs with the web? If it can not run in a browser, does it really exist?

Re: Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

The important question is: do web "developers" even exist.

But then, I'm a dreamer (but I'm not the only one).

Re:Oracle Forms

[gbjbaanb]

Nothing stopping the open source community from implementing a 100% compatible .NET library. Other than not giving a shit about it.

you want .NET on Linux, go ahead and port it yourself. If its so easy then you should have it done by teatime. Nobody in the FOSS community wants it to be ported, and they don;t want to use it either, so there is no expectation of such things happening.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like Java, only not terrible.

And only runs on Windows.

Ever heard of Mono?

http://www.mono-project.com/

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono?

Re:Oracle Forms

[ADRA]

Dunno what you mean. Java has supported multiple JRE impl's on the same PC for at the very least 5 years and if a crap tool like FORMS does something wrong, then I'd say they're crap for it. Why not blame Flash because my Twitch video is stuttering, or blame HTTP because the web site I want to view threw a 404. Ultimately, if the end user vendor sells a crap product then blame the product, not the tool generally.

Re:Oracle Forms

[StormReaver]

...the only use I can see for Java on the desktop is to enable machines to get infected with malware.

Do you realize that Java isn't just a browser plugin, and that Java on the desktop doesn't mean just applets? All of my modern software is written in Java+Swing (or just Java if the project is a server), and never touches a web browser.

Please try to understand the difference between Java applets and Java applications, as they are starkly different.

Oracle Forms is a monumental, absolute, obsolete, unmitigated piece of shit. But Oracle Forms != Java.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried to run mono there was still a crapload of things that wouldn't work properly. Anything DRM related for example.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Just Some Guy]

Ever heard of Mono?

Oh, that weird-ass thing that Miguel invented to try to drag the Linux crowd away from multi-vendor, vetted languages? Yeah, I've heard of it.

Re:Oracle Forms

[0123456]

That's the thing that runs a tiny subset of Windows C# programs, isn't it?

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

You can say they are different. I'll tell you how they are the same: they both break spectacularly and randomly with every Java update. Randomly because some work great with multiple versions of Java, but then break because Oracle are dilholes and remove features. Others can't seem to manage to work with anything but a single version - and not just a single family, a single version such as 1.7.0_43. When trying to keep a large enterprise secure and some of their apps / applets / programs require Java you are screwed. Break the apps or be insecure. You can't be both secure and working. Oracle's implementation of Java sucks because of this.

Re:Oracle Forms

[flacco]

It's like Java, only not terrible.

And only runs on Windows.

And also it's terrible.

Re:Oracle Forms

[flacco]

Actually we don't expect anything from Microsoft and don't really care what it does. Anymore, at least.

Re:Oracle Forms

[LordLimecat]

Updating Java has long been known to break stuff. Old Cisco Pixes used Java for the web interface, and it didnt work with anything but JRE 1.4.2. EFI printing controllers rely on 1.6.0 and break with anything newer. Im sure other admins can vouch for a million widgets that break when you upgrade java.

Re:Oracle Forms

[DarthVain]

I can confirm that. I just finished a course last year on Oracle 10g (yeah I know, it should have been at least 11, but I didn't write the course). Part of it included Oracle Forms. I had a hell of a time getting it to function and display as it should. It involved installing a legacy version of Java, then swapping out a particular file with one patched that was found on the Internet. Then then it operated rather wonky, seemingly working sometimes, and other times not. Reopening the application, and refreshing the browser a bunch and hoping for the best seemed to be the working method. That said trying to run Oracle 10g on a Windows 7 environment, using current browsers (I had 4 browsers installed, because some would work for somethings and not others)... Anyway it was painful. I've heard they switched to Oracle 11 the next semester... jerks. Anyway it seems a very amateur Jerry rigged method was the only way to get Oracle Forms in 10g to work with current browsers and java. Not something you expect from a large company like Oracle. Though in their defense, 10g had been around long enough that Oracle actually stopped supporting it right at the beginning of the course, which was fscked as our first assignment was to download a version of 10g from Oracle... which they stopped allowing. LOL! Fail.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing stopping the open source community from implementing a 100% compatible .NET library. Other than incompetence.

No the problem for us would be to duplicate M$ incompetence... slight nuance here...

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

And the only reason is because it's MS..

I used to know a CEO of a small business computer retailer that carried only Intel CPU, refused to carry a single AMD...

Well, that business is *long gone*..

Sounds to me like the big bad 'FOSS' community might take note of the above lesson.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Sigma 7]

If its so easy then you should have it done by teatime.

"Easy" is besides the point, and said easy portion is not a bottleneck.

Let's look at MinGW/MSYS, which I discovered omits certain critical definitions (e.g. EILSEQ etc.) from a recent download. Fixing them is "easy" but not of that helps the hard portion - getting the fix into the main repository so that others don't have to keep fixing it in the build environment - especially when that bug causes a violation of ANSI C specification.

Something like that can be picked up in an easy smoke test (e.g. ensuring that MinGW/MSYS packages are self-hosting). Yet, it hasn't.

Writing software is easy. Getting it distributed, or even trying to get everyone to agree on the color of the bike shed, is hard.

Nobody in the FOSS community wants it to be ported

The alternative is to write a framework that's superior to C#, .NET or other propriatery technologies - and get it deployed so that anyone can dive in with minimal difficulty (including initial learning time.)

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a FOSS user and developer, and I would love to see .Net outright ported to Linux. Windows, while nice for some things, is overpriced and unnecessary for many things. I'd love to be able to whip up a quick command line app that could batch process stuff on a Linux box. It's like a scripting language, but with type safety and actually useful language features. Nothing in Linux-land has even come close.

I just wish the mono team would focus on integrating mono into the OS a bit more, so you don't have to use mono whatever to run your otherwise-executable code. Windows has "the Linux way" beat hands-down there. When I compile a .Net app, it's an executable. Period. So it needs some different libraries loaded. Zero fucks given. Run, dammit.

Re: Oracle Forms

[Threni]

I have no idea why Microsoft isn't pushing the fuck out of c# on Linux. At the moment for apps you have to use c++ or Java if you want to support both. They've already open sourced the compilers.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried to run mono there was still a crapload of things that wouldn't work properly. Anything DRM related for example.

Because Linux users want DRM?

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

And the only reason is because it's MS..

I used to know a CEO of a small business computer retailer that carried only Intel CPU, refused to carry a single AMD...

Well, that business is *long gone*..

Sounds to me like the big bad 'FOSS' community might take note of the above lesson.

I know a CEO of a not so small computer retailer that carried only Intel CPU, refused to carry a single AMD. The retailers name is Dell. They are still around.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody in the FOSS community wants it [.NET] to be ported, and they don't want to use it either...

It is precisely due to attitudes such as yours that I choose not contribute to the open source community. Implementations aside, there are lots of great people that could build your next favorite open source project, but they won't due to such flaming arrogance. You have to decide. What's more important?

Re: Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Or python with qt.. or object pascal with qt... or pretty much anything with qt. Tons of options, actually, all better than java or c++.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if you don't care about Windows, Mono's compatibility with it really doesn't matter. Mono is a solid platform in its own right, in spite of its API and core languages being strongly inspired by the Microsoft.NET runtime.

Mono's goal isn't to be like WINE, it's to provide a modern VM and langage runtime to the open source community, standing on the shoulders of Microsoft's investment.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you can make the call for the entire FOSS community.

Mono does what it does quite well and allows people who don't have experience in other languages to put a foot into the Linux world. The .NET runtime is like Java, except faster and well fostered. There are a number of languages targeting it, a variety of good tooling and a large pool of decent developers who use it. There are also a number of Free and Open Source projects which utilise it -- but I guess that doesn't make it FOSS enough for you?

Climb off your horse man. The days when it was cool to hate Redmond are over. The cool kids, like Linus Torvalds, are more interested in interesting questions like "does it work?", "does it perform?", "can I program something robust in it fairly quickly and move on to the next interesting problem?". I'm not saying it's the only solution (far from it), but it's not something that "Nobody in the FOSS community" wants ported by a long shot. If you took your head out of your ass for a moment, stopped trying so hard to be 1337 and just grew up a little, you'd see that.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

I recon everyone is FOSS is scared that Mono would become too popular and could possibly overtake Java.

Re:Oracle Forms

[Anonymous Coward]

Updating Java has long been known to break stuff. Old Cisco Pixes used Java for the web interface, and it didnt work with anything but JRE 1.4.2. EFI printing controllers rely on 1.6.0 and break with anything newer. Im sure other admins can vouch for a million widgets that break when you upgrade java.

And this is why everything should be open sourced, because most of that stuff is fixable with a recompile (technically good Java programs roll forward, it's the morons that import sun.misc.* like that's an okay thing to do, STOP DOING THAT). There was an issue with the byte code verifier really not being compatible with things that old versions of CGLIB did to the byte code at run time (you can get around that by running with useSplitVerifier=true, generally).

Yes, I know it sounds like a pain in the ass for most people, but so does C code. It's not a pain for someone like me, it's easy, and there's a legion of Java folks out there. But, decompiling byte code and recreating build scripts really is too big of a pain, half the time you can't even do it, it needs to be open sourced.

So yes, another case of FOSS==Problem Solved.

"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[timrod]

What else does this article's author expect Java to be? A programming language and a runtime are exactly what Java is supposed to be.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

But java was supposed to be the only language you ever need! Websites written in java serving java applets to your java browser.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Think holistically, man.
Java needs to be a community of fanboys.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Kenja]

Then what have I been drinking every morning?

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[bobbied]

Then what have I been drinking every morning?

Hot water passed though over cooked ground up Java Beans perhaps?

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Z00L00K]

I think that Java started to fail when it went into a split of Standard Edition and Micro Edition instead of relying on the same core for both platforms and then have a good interface between the different libraries. Of course - today the mobile devices are often powerful enough to run Java SE, but it still comes with unnecessary overhead there. The problems with diverting code started when Java 5 was released when you could improve the code considerably when it comes to being type safe through the Generics feature. However Java ME did not follow and that caused problems for developers trying to create a write once, run everywhere app.

I think that the business model that Oracle has is not working when it comes to projects like Java where there is a large codebase depending on the openness of the platform - and by cutting the strings Oracle will suddenly make Java insignificant even though it has been in decline for some while. Cutting the strings might also alienate many major companies that have a large codebase in Java today and that depends on a long term support of that language. So Oracle may sit with something that they want to turn into a fully commercial unit while at the same time they can't because it will kill the product. And a dead product means that they can't find any software developers on the market for their own software written in Java. A catch 22.

The other way around would be to make Java fully open source under some useful license, e.g. the Apache License. But I don't think that Oracle understands how to maintain control then.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[bluefoxlucid]

The author is fanboying Java. It's Java, it should be everywhere, Java is awesome, etc.

Java is proprietary, supplanted by CIL, which is ISO standard. There are better languages--like Python--and anything could run on CIL if you got LLVM to output CIL. You could even run Ruby and Java on CIL, if you were so insane as to go with Ruby. C and C++ work on CIL.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[disposable60]

Malkovich all the way down.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Jahta]

What else does this article's author expect Java to be? A programming language and a runtime are exactly what Java is supposed to be.

Exactly. You would think that a self-proclaimed "Strategic Developer" would know that! :-)

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, you want a corporation to give you a highly complex piece of technology FOR FREE ?

It worked out well for SUN.

NOT.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

"language with a huge install base": the author is saying that's becoming the only redeeming quality of Java itself, having been surpassed by other languages on features.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Horshu]

Libraries.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[drolli]

And it has stagnated because it conquered everything up ato a realistc marke penetration for a single platform.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Python, are you fucking kidding me. There's a reason why they use that to introduce people to programming before giving them a real language to work with. It was designed by fucking morons. Just look at the havoc that ensues if your filesync software accidentally removes the whitespace from the beginning of the lines. At least with Java and all the other commonly used programming languages, it's relatively easy to reformat that and fix the damage. But, because Python normally uses whitespace for syntactical reasons, the program has no way of knowing how the formatting should have been.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[gbjbaanb]

Could be that was the start of the decline, but I think the real killer blow was when all the browsers decided to put it on the equivalent of a 'do not fly' list.

Everyone and his dog now knows its not to be trusted, its a security nightmare, in addition to being dog slow and having really poor UIs.

(whether that is true or not, doesn't matter).

So now.. who wants to be a Java developer? Its akin to admitting to work for Walmart in the personal hygiene section.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I have been doing it SO wrong all these years.
I have been passing hot water through ground-up Netbeans. No wonder I only tasted the highlights.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

being type safe through the Generics feature

Set<Foo> fooSet = new HashSet<Foo>();
Bar bar = new Bar();
if(fooSet.contains(bar)) ...

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[suutar]

He wants new features, new syntactical elements, gamechangers like generics, enums, and closures. He wants fun things to learn while sticking with the "same" language, things which will hopefully let him use even higher layers of abstraction.

Which is not in itself a bad thing. If Java doesn't add new useful features it'll get replaced by something that has them. But I'm not sure Java has a lot of room left in its complexity budget to add new stuff without becoming too confusing to stick with (assuming it hasn't already, which is debatable :) It may be best to let Java coast for a bit.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to run C# in the browser and see how that goes. Its a pain to get anything but Javascript running in the browser.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[wangmaster]

There is a HUGE difference between Java browser plug-ins and non-browser Java development. HUGE HUGE HUGE difference. One that anyone even remotely familiar with Java development would be able to understand.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is available for free, isn't it? I never had to pay to download it.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[reikae]

That same filesync software just messed up all of your other files too, so you just restore them to an earlier, good state. I'm not really a fan of meaningful whitespace either, but your scenario is solved by backups/version control, not change of language.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily, it depends how the utility works. It's not going to affect binary data and the only text file that are going to have issues are ones where there's excessive white space. So, to suggest that it's going to mess up all the other files is misleading. The point is that it's an unecessary risk that's been added because Python developers are presumed to be bad developers.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting how slow python is compared to Java/C++

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what have I been drinking every morning?

I'm informed by an international coffee trader who's been around the block a few times that, unless you are either (a) paying an awful lot of money for it or (b) located in Japan [which, given your username, I concede is quite possible], it is almost certainly not Java. Most coffee sold as Java is actually Sumatran in origin, apparently, because a handful of Japanese companies buy almost the entire annual crop of actual Java coffee and then only sell it in their domestic markets.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Waffle Iron]

Just look at the havoc that ensues if your filesync software accidentally removes the whitespace from the beginning of the lines.

In that case, you're not running file sync software. You're running a file transformation program.

The same thing would happen to Java files if you had a file transformation program that removed curly braces.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[retchdog]

why the hell should a filesync utility be doing that in the first place? we don't have 5MB hard drives any more. there's no reason to be doing this.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[cheesybagel]

The major reason Sun went belly up wasn't because of Java. It was because SPARC sucked donkey balls.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[gbjbaanb]

I thought it was clear - it has fuck all to do with the merits of the various bits and types of java - its lost the battle for popularity. Its seen as insecure and slow.

Nobody wants the runtime on their systems, so any java app will not be as popular as any written in a different system.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at the havoc that ensues if your filesync software accidentally removes the whitespace from the beginning of the lines.

"Doctor, it hurts when I stab myself!"
"Well, don't do it then."

FWIW, having done substantial projects in both, I'd rather work in Python than Java any day. Well, each to their own I suppose.

(I suspect folks who complain about Python whitespace have never actually used it much. I *prefer* Python's take.)

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is only a security nightmare because of its huge installed based. So in that sense it was no more a security nightmare than Windows, IE, or Chrome. It was installed everywhere, and there were enough unmaintained, unpatched installations that it provided a huge reservoir of exploitable boxes.

It's an example of monoculture, and what happens when you put all your eggs into one basket. In general the code quality of the JVM and JRE was way above average. But it just wasn't good enough given how big and valuable of a target it was. Plus the platform itself wasn't stable enough, so nobody cared about saving it.

The way to save Java was to do exactly what other huge monocultures did: rapid and automatic updates. That's what saved Windows and IE, and it's what has kept Chrome and Firefox from becoming actual security nightmares. But Oracle is too slow.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can assure you, there would be considerable uproar if they cut the Strings.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why C hasn't changed much. The committee is too smart to get on the feature treadmill.

This is also why C++'s days are numbered. If they ever add garbage collection, then mark my words, it'll be a death knell for C++. And backward compatibility doesn't help, because if the reason for your huge installed base is fancy features, once those fickle developers move on (as they will eventually, because it's not a race any particular language could ever win, particularly one managed by committee), your installed base will enter a death spiral. /bin/sh, Perl, and Python are also good examples of this. They'd be dead languages except for the huge installed base which couldn't be bothered to move to newer, fancier versions. Alternatives came along faster than those communities could add new features. So the only merit that has kept them alive is stability.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate syntactic whitespace as much as anyone, I imagine, and don't personally deal well with Python's schizophrenia about whether various operations should be methods in a core class or simply built-in functions, but blaming Python for not working well with "filesync software" that "accidentally" removes bits of your source code is a bit much. You could, after all, say the same thing about compiled binaries, if some misguided application chose to remove any spaces following newlines that it found within.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[snemarch]

So now.. who wants to be a Java developer? Its akin to admitting to work for Walmart in the personal hygiene section.

Umm, have anybody (outside insane project like the Danish NemID) been doing applet programming for the last 10 years?

Serverside Java is still pretty strong, and I don't expect it will go away for a long time - and JVM-based stuff will last even longer, unless whOracle manage to screw up bigtime.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

if your filesync software accidentally removes the whitespace from the beginning of the lines.

You must be kidding me if you believe that is the fault of Python rather than some shitty synching software

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

> Java is only a security nightmare because of its huge installed based.

No it isn't. It's a security nightmare because it includes a massive ball of crufty libraries which are often poorly designed, and went with a very granular security architecture rather than factoring it down to half-a-dozen application categories that a user could understand and grant.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[gbjbaanb]

serverside COBOL is still going strong. So what was your point?

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Python is dynamically typed, has a GIL, and the primary implementation is absolute garbage. Kill yourself.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Jahta]

He wants new features, new syntactical elements, gamechangers like generics, enums, and closures. He wants fun things to learn while sticking with the "same" language, things which will hopefully let him use even higher layers of abstraction.

Which is not in itself a bad thing. If Java doesn't add new useful features it'll get replaced by something that has them. But I'm not sure Java has a lot of room left in its complexity budget to add new stuff without becoming too confusing to stick with (assuming it hasn't already, which is debatable :) It may be best to let Java coast for a bit.

The funny thing is that new features (like closures) have been appearing much more regularly since Oracle took over. The author of TFA seems to forget that after Sun released Java 6 (in 2006) there wasn't major release for years, and Java developers despaired as useful proposed new features got mired in the JCP.

Since Oracle took over we've had two major releases - Java 7 (in 2011), and Java 8 (in 2014) - as well a multiple minor releases. Java 9 is targeted for 2016. It's hardly a language that is stagnating.

Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language"

[Anonymous Coward]

Java started to fail when it was released. The mantra "Write once run everywhere" never materialized (yes, you could get a moderately complex app working on multiple platforms with tweaking but you could do that with C and a cross platform library and it would be a helluvalot faster and use less memory). But garbage collection will fix memory leaks... really?
I guess I can't blame the misuse of inheritance on Java but it did seem to spawn a lot of fat incestuous software.
Then there is what I call the migration path from DLL Hell to JRE Purgatory, previously mentioned before where the upgrade to a new JRE (seemingly required every other day now approaching flash player annoyance levels) broke code. The result was multiple versions of JRE's residing on client systems with some apps requiring a specific version. At least now the new installs can optionally cleanup older versions not required by existing apps.

Seriously?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Andrew Oliver? The shit mountain of self-importance? Still hasn't died of a heart attack? WhyTF is this on /.? Has this website really sunk that far?

Re:Seriously?!?!

[multimediavt]

Andrew Oliver? The shit mountain of self-importance? Still hasn't died of a heart attack? WhyTF is this on /.? Has this website really sunk that far?

In a word, "Yup."

This is the best case scenario

[netsavior]

Oracle can't figure out how to screw over java, and we are complaining?

Re:This is the best case scenario

[Skuld-Chan]

Well yeah - if they could figure out how to screw it up I wouldn't have to support it anymore. I work with a bunch of Oracle developers and I think Oracle are trying their hardest to screw up Java, but the problem is - all the universities teach Java and there are so many Java developers out there.

Re: This is the best case scenario

[O('_')O_Bush]

Well, screwing stuff over really isn't Oracle's modus operandi. Sitting on cash cows is. They have managed to do that just fine... to the detriment of developers who want the language improved.

Re:This is the best case scenario

[rubycodez]

yes they have, posting minor upgrades that break major API

Re:This is the best case scenario

[Jane Q. Public]

Oracle can't figure out how to screw over java, and we are complaining?

No. Oracle *IS* screwing over Java, and we are complaining. That's what OP was all about.

It's the same crap they did to MySQL, it's just slower. Do you really wonder why most big web hosts have switched to MariaDB? (Hint: they probably won't tell you about it either. They still advertise MySQL, which for practical purposes it still is.)

Re:This is the best case scenario

[aralin]

Come on! Stop already with the Oracle hating. I'm just sick of it. It is completely irrational, but hey, we are on Slashdot. So why not..

Anyway, I hope MySQL and Java die a horrible death. Those are both crap pieces of technology and they would deserve it. And no MariaDB is not any better. I was really hoping that we just all use this opportunity to switch to something decent, like Postgres.

Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Java EE is dead

Really?

I guess I missed that.

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

More over... spring dead? =/

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, NodeJS has pretty much taken over as the go-to language in enterprise development now.

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I read that in TFS and was like "WTF? How do you declare something dead that solves so many business problems with relative ease?"

At that point I guessed that the TFA was written by a clueless writer at Infoworld. Hovered over the link, and sure enough, my guess was right.

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, NodeJS has pretty much taken over as the go-to language in enterprise development now.

Damn you, had to clean my screen after that one.

Re: Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah, no it hasn't. Jesus. I love node, but the ecosystem is still a messy collection of immature libraries. There are some very cool frameworks and experimental bits. The node community reminds me of early-days Rails - lots of true believers reinventing the wheel in their favourite language. Spring is a well-designed and mature framework that has been getting better every year, and it isn't limited to Web applications. Java is verbose and slow to change, and it doesn't attract gee-whiz handwavy types (yay). It's always refreshing to get called into a company that needs help with a Spring application - nice clean well-separated concerns and stable libraries as opposed to the mess that production apps in PHP, Rails, or node seem to become.

Re:Java EE is dead

[K. S. Kyosuke]

C:\> CLS_

Re:Java EE is dead

[gbjbaanb]

for this week....

Re:Java EE is dead

[DoofusOfDeath]

Yep, NodeJS has pretty much taken over as the go-to language in enterprise development now.

Yes, but does it shard? Is it NoSQL? NoSQL is faster. NoSQL shards.

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

So... NodeJS considered harmful?

Re: Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, yes, the Rails code base tend to be messy. The PHP code base tend to make it vomit.

No idea how Node is, how if history is to repeat itself, it is basically a bunch of bozos polluting a great language/idea, and try to reinvent the wheel, and profit from reinventing the wheel.

Why am I more and more disappointed in what programming has become...

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I take you are your mod, which is Funny.

The reason that Spring is dead is because Java EE 6 replaced it.

NodeJS is indeed the go-to language for people interested in playing with technology. For people interested in making enterprise applications, you're still better off with just about anything else, including Java EE.

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

$ clear

Re:Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but does it shard? Is it NoSQL? NoSQL is faster. NoSQL shards.

RDBMSes enforce normalization. Hipsters can't (easily) crap out a kooky storage framework that requires me to learn to fly a plane just to get a user name from a primary key. You'll be hard pressed to take my Codd database architecture away from me. I'm also keeping my stored procedures, triggers, and standard validation enforcement, indexed foreign keys, and indexes in general for that matter.

whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

ignorant troll.

Oh noes!

[qbast]

Some random nobody proclaims death of Java. Thousands of companies that do depend on Java EE just vanished in puff of logic.

Re:Oh noes!

[MightyMartian]

Java is becoming the new COBOL. It may not get much respect with the hip young cats, but it's ubiquitous and those that know how to code well in it will always have employment.

To me, it's just a programming language and library ecosystem. There are aspects I don't like, but, providing I don't get too damned clever, I can run my code on all the major platforms, which makes it better than just about anything else out there. For portability, it remains the king.

Re:Oh noes!

[phantomfive]

For portability, it remains the king.

As long as you don't want to run on iPhone or WindowsPhone, or any number of other CPUs. As long as you stick to Windows/Mac/Linux, Java is good for portability

Unless you want to write a library that can be used from several different other languages, like Cython bindings to Python, or JNI to Java, then you should use C. But if you don't want to do that, and you only have a few platforms that you care about, then Java is good for portability.

Re:Oh noes!

[phantomfive]

Some random nobody proclaims death of Java.

He's not a random nobody. He's a strategic developer. The big ideas are the Cloud, NoSQL, and Big Data. You heard it from him first. Java needs to embrace them.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is easily the dominant language in those areas.

Re:Oh noes!

[Ravaldy]

He didn't say it was dead. He just said it's hitting a dead end and he's right. Just like many other runtime have managed to stay alive only because large infrastructures already live off of it but these same runtimes aren't growing.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Java performance has improved greatly since its initial release 15+ years ago. It can get close the speed of C++ in many scenarios :

http://codexpi.com/java-vs-cpp-performance-comparison-jit-compilers-java-hotspot-c-native-compiler/

Re:Oh noes!

[oh_my_080980980]

You mean script kiddies that write apps for iPhones and don't know how to program....no great loss.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the 99% of runtime it does not use GC. While running GC, your user better freezes, too.

Re:Oh noes!

[0123456]

For the 99% of runtime it does not use GC. While running GC, your user better freezes, too.

Particularly when your whole machine runs out of RAM running a few Java apps that want a few gigabytes each to reduce garbage collection pauses, and starts swapping.

Re:Oh noes!

[Vellmont]

Java is becoming the new COBOL.

I'd like to be the first to say... huh? I'm sure Java will become a legacy language some day, but hipsters don't really define much of anything. Hipsters are against anything that's popular (because popularity by definition isn't hip), and go for the obscure things. That's why PBR became popular. It's not good, but among the younger set microbrews are very popular, so a hipster has to go for something unpopular to distinguish themselves from what's popular.

20 years ago people used to say that about C. C is dying, C is going to be replaced, etc, etc. Didn't happen. By popularity C has a lot more competition, but it's alive and well and not going away. People hate COBOL because it was a badly designed language. If anything is the new COBOL, it's PHP. I've known several PHP programmers, and many of them have switched to another language not because of a lack of jobs, but because they hate the language. I'm not old enough to have been around for the COBOL era, but I'd guess it was the same then.

The death of a language starts when developers leave it in droves for something else. I don't see that happeneing for Java. Do you?

Re:Oh noes!

[Vellmont]

You just listed 3 buzzwords. None of them are "big ideas", they're vague concepts, of which a subset of the vague concepts are good ideas.

Java is a programming language. Can you expound on what exactly Java is missing to embrace whatever it is you think is good about them?

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the 99% of runtime it does not use GC. While running GC, your user better freezes, too.

Particularly when your whole machine runs out of RAM running a few Java apps that want a few gigabytes each to reduce garbage collection pauses, and starts swapping.

Yeah, properly sizing the RAM on your machine to the load you're going to put on it is SO FUCKING HARD.

Re:Oh noes!

[qbast]

Yeah, sure. Nobody cares about some 'oracle taint' except for ruby-loving hippies and die-hard open source fanatics. Definitely not the companies that have been using Java EE in first place.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's why currently iOS development is one of the biggest paying jobs in software development, I guess those script kiddies got really sucessful without knowing to program.

I guess you're that special kind of internet tard, the same one that in the 90s keeping posting about "M$" and now that Apple too got mainstream, well, it turned into the new bully in the block.

There's nothing really different in programming for iOS than for Android or even desktop. I work with a huge code base that runs on all common OSes (both desktop and mobile), and guess what, it certainly wasn't written in Java. Java is not the most portable, is not the most productive, it is not the most performant, it is not the one with most libraries, well, I could go on. Since our company is not run by corporate parrots, we never really had a need for it.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet bud light is cheapest at O.C. Fair Queen Concert.

Re:Oh noes!

[0123456]

Yeah, properly sizing the RAM on your machine to the load you're going to put on it is SO FUCKING HARD.

Or you could just use a language that doesn't need 1+GB of RAM for an IDE... because garbage collection.

Re:Oh noes!

[MightyMartian]

From an executable (if I can use the word for byte code) point of view, yes Java is the most portable. I compile once, run in many places. That doesn't really apply to Android or iOS, of course, but since I don't write mobile apps, I don't fret. But I do write apps that run on Windows boxes, Macs and *nix machines, and, as I said, as long as I'm careful to keep things version and platform neutral, my jar file can run on all these platforms. Code portability and executable portability are two different things.

Re:Oh noes!

[stewsters]

You can program java in vi. Its still just text files. That memory is mostly used for things like autocomplete and refactoring support.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can make iPhone apps with Java, just use a cross platform framework, there are tons to choose from.

Re:Oh noes!

[gangien]

dat whoosh.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a joke, son. You're built too low. The fast ones go over your head.

tl;dr: WOOosh!

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the script kiddies whose code runs on 10x more machines than any program written for a PC ever? Yeah they're idiots who don't know jack about getting their software deployed to massive captive markets. Punks.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

For portability, it remains the king.

As long as you don't want to run on iPhone or WindowsPhone, or any number of other CPUs. As long as you stick to Windows/Mac/Linux, Java is good for portability.

You mean as long as you stick to Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, z/OS, IBM i (formerly known as OS/400), OpenVMS, ...

Oh, and Java apps can be made to run on iPhones and Windows Phone. It's just not trivially easy.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The death of a language starts when developers leave it in droves for something else. I don't see that happeneing for Java. Do you?

Yes. Don't you?

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some random nobody proclaims death of Java.

He's not a random nobody. He's a strategic developer. The big ideas are the Cloud, NoSQL, and Big Data. You heard it from him first. Java needs to embrace them.

One of the biggest "Cloud" providers is Google AppEngine, which exclusively runs Java apps. Java has no problem running on other cloud providers, and powers a fair proportion of well known cloud applications. Some of the biggest NoSQL databases are written in Java (e.g. Hadoop, Cassandra, BDB Java Edition, Neo4J, db4o, etc.), and most of the other well known ones have Java bindings available. And let's just laugh at the suggestion that Java has any problem with Big Data... the two are almost synonymous in many environments.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Java needs to embrace big data. What is Hadoop ?

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the GP, but I'm pretty sure he/she was being sarcastic.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Poorly written apps are poorly written...

You can leak memory in many or hold onto references in any language and it'll perform just as horribly.

Java does make the unfortunate assumption that the programmer doesn't do stupid stuff wrt creating lots of throwaway objects. C++, for instance, doesn't make that assumption. In C++, this mistake just makes the program run really slowly the entire time rather than running fairly quickly and then pausing for GC. It is pretty easy to diagnose the problem from a heap dump though.

Re:Oh noes!

[phantomfive]

I literally was summarizing what the author of the article wrote. Even in those vague concepts, Java is the primary language involved AFAICT.

There's so much fun like that going on in the article.

Re:Oh noes!

[LordLucless]

The death of a language starts when developers leave it in droves for something else. I don't see that happeneing for Java. Do you?

Pretty much. Nobody I know starts a new project in Java. Sure, they'll maintain it, and if they already run it, they'll add new features to an existing Java system, but if I ask someone to start a new web project, and ask them what the best language to develop it in is, I don't know anyone that would say "Java" (whereas go back 10 years, and it would have been all I heard). And Java desktop apps never really took off.

The only thing that's keeping Java relevant for new development is Google, with Android - and funnily enough, Oracle was busily involved in suing them over it. I feel like Oracle must be deliberately trying to run Java into the ground at this point.

Here's the problem

[Nimey]

Oracle can't figure out how to charge $5000 per CPU per year for Java, so it's not really interested.

Re:Here's the problem

[gstoddart]

Which is why they piggy back that Ask.com pile of crap onto the installer.

They can't quite get the licensing costs they'd like, so they've gone the cheap douchebag route and added crapware.

Re:Here's the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why they piggy back that Ask.com pile of crap onto the installer.

They can't quite get the licensing costs they'd like, so they've gone the cheap douchebag route and added crapware.

Is there a way I can configure my system to automagically block the Ask.com install screen (and its installer, and its little dog too)? I'd rather not accidentally get bloatware if I misclick on the next update.

Re:Here's the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there's a registry key you can set:

http://superuser.com/questions/549028/how-can-i-prevent-ask-com-toolbar-from-being-installed-every-time-java-is-update

Re:Here's the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear a bell tolling there as well.

Re:Here's the problem

[aralin]

Nice, yet another "I hate Oracle" troll. Man, you won't get accepted by the cool kids if you spout this 5 year old shit. We've all moved on and you are not impressing anybody here with that one liner. Get with the times. :)

Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge troll. They got Java 7 released after Sun let it stagnate for years, they released Java 8 with major improvements the community has wanted for years, they are currently working on Java 9 and the module system, etc. Java EE and Sprign certainly are not dead. I regularly attend a local JUG and I would say the majority of people are using Java EE features such as Servlets, JPA, JAX-RS, JAX-WS, many are moving into CDI, and yes there are even a bunch of JSF users. There are Spring users too. IMO the Java community is alive and well.

Re:Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

, they released Java 8 with major improvements the community has wanted for years

Debian user here, what is that Java 8 you speak of? apt-get only gives me 7 and checking on openjdk.net only gives me a preview version with a rather restrictive "you may look at it, just don't try anything with it" license. Also still waiting for that JavaFX that was released with some Java 7 update that never made it into OpenJDK.

Re:Troll

[qbast]

Java 8 ... yes, it finally got some long awaited features. But 7 was huge disappointment.

Re:Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

... checking on openjdk.net only gives me a preview version with a rather restrictive "you may look at it, just don't try anything with it" license.

Maybe you should go back to the site more than once every five months? OpenJDK 8 has been General Availability since March.

Re:Troll

[robmv]

For once we beat Debian packaging then

# yum list java-1.8.0-openjdk
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit, remove-with-leaves, show-leaves
Installed Packages
java-1.8.0-openjdk.x86_64 ... ...

Re:Troll

[stewsters]

http://www.webupd8.org/2014/03...

Re:Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Micro was going under $$$. Oracle was taking over Java. There is transition time between Java versions. I am still surprised a database company (Oracle) beat a hardware company (Sun).

Re:Troll

[lexman098]

IANAL, but IDK WTF most of those acronyms mean.

Where are the big ideas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'd rather not see Oracle get any big ideas. They usually end badly.

JAVA EE is not dead.

[jaeztheangel]

With Lambda expressions in the last release, and the renewed focus on mobile - Java is awesome. For a language which forced Microsoft to up it's game with C#, and with Linux has stormed into taking over most of financial services - it's as least as alive as COBOL. Which - like Sarah Palin - cannot be killed and will not go away. Java has the Colbert of Languages. Wildly successful, despite being in a suit.

Re:JAVA EE is not dead.

[Jaime2]

For a language which forced Microsoft to up it's game with C#

Java has been playing catch up with C# for almost ten years. Attributes, generics, and lambdas were all added to Java long after they were added to C#. Also, Microsoft made them part of the runtime, while Java only made them part of the compiler (for the most part), so the features work a lot better in C#.

The point of this article is that Oracle has been slowing down the pace of innovation to an even slower pace than Sun was at, and Sun had already lost a five year head start to Microsoft very quickly.

Re:JAVA EE is not dead.

[qbast]

Ooooh, they bought themselves an ISO standard. Quick, everybody switch to OOXML.

Re:JAVA EE is not dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Java is open source with GPLv2 which has an implicit patent grant. When Microsoft releases the spec for .NET with a patent grant, then we can call it even, until then Mono only exists until Microsoft doesn't want it to anymore.

Re:JAVA EE is not dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

The OpenJDK subset of Java7 is. JavaFX and Java8 are not.

Re:JAVA EE is not dead.

[marxmarv]

Pace of innovation? I can't understand you people who like to work 60 hour weeks just so the hamster wheel can spin faster. Get out more.

I've been thinking for a long time I could be in the wrong industry. I might be right. Y'all are nuts.

Re:JAVA EE is not dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad CLR still hasn't caught up to JVM when it comes to optimizing and JITing.

What we need is a c# source to JVM opcode compiler.

Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[gstoddart]

Where cool technology goes to die.

Large corporations often do not have the vision, flexibility, or ability to execute on these things.

They're not making technology for the sake of making better technology, they're doing it purely to monetize it and make money -- for example, Oracle's insistence on keeping that stupid ask.com toolbar in the Java installer.

Oracle doesn't need the revenue from putting shitware on computers, but they do it anyway. Something about "One Rich Asshole".

Instead of writing a good platform which people use, Oracle have just been doing the greedy asshole thing.

Which, considering how much of their stuff runs on Java, you'd think they'd have an interest in keeping the platform working and widely used.

Sun could be visionaries, but Oracle not so much apparently.

I think a lot of people expected Java to begin its decline once it was in the hands of Oracle -- who are completely incapable of being the stewards of an open standard which doesn't generate huge amounts of revenue.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Which, considering how much of their stuff runs on Java, you'd think they'd have an interest in keeping the platform working and widely used.

Why? That's an expense. Oracle bought Sun for two things: to get SPARC's highly threadded architecture to make the existing database product continue to scale, and also to get the Java patents to sue Google into cross-licensing its very large distributed database patents. They still haven't given up on the latter and the former will run out of steam in the not too distant future.

If everybody hates Java and uninstalls it, that's one fewer thing for Oracle to maintain. The patents will be legal even if the product is cancelled. That's also why you don't see them just dumping it on Apache, which would be a good thing for the community, but bad for patent prosecution.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[disposable60]

Something about "One Rich Asshole".

One Rich Asshole Can Louse-up Everything?

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[gstoddart]

You clearly aren't qualified to speak about Java

Oh, then tell me oh great and qualified peckerhead ... what new features and functionality which are of note has Oracle put into it? Anything?

I made my living programming in Java for several years.

I've used both the SE and EE versions.

As far as I can tell, the changes applied in Java lately are minor syntactic sugar, and not much else. No innovation, nothing new and shiny, no compelling reason to upgrade other than the inevitable security holes.

Really, the only thing I've seen Oracle innovate in terms of Java (and, yes, it's been a while since I actively used it) was the shitvertizing which is the Ask.com toolbar.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So is C++ dead too because there haven't been any changes lately besides "minor syntactic sugar"

Why does a language need constant HUGE changes to survive? If its a good language it shouldn't need huge changes.

Re: Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It needs regular major changes to stay 'hipster'. This is Slashdot. Why do such obvious things need to be repeated so often.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there you go, you've only been using it for several years... one release cycle. If you think there is nothing new and shiny between Java EE 5, Java EE 6, Java EE 7, or SE 8, etc. then you haven't been keeping yourself up to date.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[IamTheRealMike]

They're not making technology for the sake of making better technology, they're doing it purely to monetize it and make money -- for example, Oracle's insistence on keeping that stupid ask.com toolbar in the Java installer.

Yes, that really sucks, but it's probably the only direct way Java makes money. Otherwise it's basically a charity, right?

Fortunately the last installer at least will not try and reinstall this crap on upgrades. So you get asked once. More importantly if you're wanting to distribute desktop apps, you don't have to request that the user installs Java anymore, it can be bundled. And the crapware was only ever a Windows thing. Mac and Linux users don't suffer from it.

My gut sense is that the Java team at Oracle know this is horrible and are doing their best to chip away at it, but can't go to management and ask them to give up the only direct revenue stream the entire project has.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[roman_mir]

Sun could be visionaries, but Oracle not so much apparently.

- Sun is dead and Oracle is as rich as ever.

Personally I do not allow my developers to use language features that prevent easier debugging, prevent reuse of objects, prevent knowing what iteration of the loop is running currently in the debugger.

So I do not allow autoboxing, I do not allow 'for each' java constructs, I do not allow generics, things of that nature. They are destructive to the language, not constructive, they allow people to write SHITTIER CODE.

AFAIC Java doesn't need more syntax sugar, it only needs to add new libraries to support missing functionality and to develop better, faster runtime environment.

How about a built in way to talk to USB and other serial ports without installing extra libraries and using JNI? How about more support for different types of hardware? There is so much that can be done to make the environment more productive, but instead people are looking at making programming less efficient and buggier.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not qualified to speak about anything.

You are defending a development environment which ships with fucking toolbar malware by default.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[DuckDodgers]

Facebook's a large company, and they came out with HipHop->HHVM and Hack, and they use the D programming language on some internal tools and employ some of the D language designers full time to work on the language. Google's a large company, and they invented Go and Dart and are helping actively develop both. Yahoo came out with Hadoop. And there are dozens of major and minor open source tools released by all three companies. And of course Red Hat, which as a company with revenue in the single billion dollar range is much smaller than the others, does everything open source.

And Microsoft, of all companies, realized they were losing relevance and started making IE standards-compliant and releasing languages like Typescript as fully open source and an open standard.

Big corporations are usually evil. I grant that. Verizon and Comcast undoubtedly are big enough to have tens of millions of lines of code in internal tools and as far as I know they don't work with open standards and they definitely don't release code or programming tools as open source. But it's not guaranteed.

Re:Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[DuckDodgers]

In terms of major new whiz-bang features that you can show off to a corporate executive or a customer? You're right, not much new. But in terms of making the language suck less to use, Java 7's try-with-resources, Java 8 lambdas, and Java 8 default implementation of interface methods are all hugely helpful. And Java EE is now possible to use without XML hell, just a few annotations and you're all set. They can't change too much, if Java EE10 completely reinvents Java EE then companies completely lose the value of their previous investment in the technology. Likewise one business advantage of Java is that you can compile Java 1.1 code with the Java 8 compiler, so some of the coolest possible advances to the language would take that away.

But what I really want to see is the language as an open standard, so everyone can get the same benefits we see from the GCC vs LLVM competition. As long as Oracle thinks they can make money by avoiding that, it will never happen.

Well, I have two additional wishlists for Java 9 or 10: default language annotation @g @s and @gs on instance variables for auto-generating a public getter, public setter, or both at compile time without making me (my IDE) clutter up the source file by creating one for me and syntactic support for tuples. I think those two things would go a long way towards simplifying the language without hurting how readable code is.

Java = Mark Twain of programming languages

[Anonymous Coward]

"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Well, well

[Anonymous Coward]

The author has set out to kill Java, not realizing that a major chunk of the new distributed Internet relies on Java. Why can't a language just be perfect and fixed?

Just because it isn't changing too many things doesn't mean it is dead.

Oh right, Java is dying (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another "Java is dying" article, even though it is the language of the most popular mobile OS in the world (Android), the most popular distributed computing platform (Hadoop), and it is the most popular language in general. There is a reason Twitter and others moved back to Java when they got big, because it just works. I guess that makes it too boring for all of the sensationalist tech writers who want to write about something new.

Re:Oh right, Java is dying (again)

[dasacc22]

Well it may be fairer to say Twitter moved to Scala limiting the point to the JVM. Also programming on Android is best limited to Java6 to avoid potential issues with transpiling to dalvik and again limiting the point to older versions of Java and only making initial use of the compiler, not the runtime. Pure speculation but a dalvik compiler would make the point solely for the semantics of the language.

Personally, I hate java, but I'm well versed in it and make a living off of it, and my points above aren't meant to counter and say java IS dying. In fact, I think clarification of those points brings out a renaissance of sorts taking place for what I overall consider a shit language, funnily enough meaning my opinion also means shit.

Java isn't going anywhere. A simple example of this is how the latest version of Scala is beginning to target features on new versions of the JVM. Java is going to be called home for a long while by its derivatives.

Re:Oh right, Java is dying (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always said the JVM will be Sun's legacy. Hotspot is an impressive piece of tech, and will probably continue to be used long after Java itself fades from popularity.

Re:Oh right, Java is dying (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Android and Java Development is fragmented and next five to ten years will not be in Googles favor but in Microsoft and Apple.

Re:Oh right, Java is dying (again)

[DuckDodgers]

I work on Java professionally too and also hate it. I've played with Scala but I've actually come to prefer Clojure (a really cool Lisp dialect on the JVM, for anyone that doesn't already know). I'm hoping to work on Clojure or maybe even plain old Lisp at my next job. There are even a few Clojure shops in my neck of the US.

Why is anyone suprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle bought sun to gut the outfit of IP and maybe con some of Sun's userbase in to Oracle products.

That, and some misplaced idea of becoming a vertically integrated one-stop solution. (Yeah. What kind of fucking moron that suffers Oracle's software pricing wants Oracle's cold clammy hands squeezing their nuts for hardware costs too)

They don't give a wet fart about Java, Java's users, or any of other's Sun's formerly important initiatives.

RMS was right about closed software. If you depend on it, you could find yourself at the mercy of some narcissistic slimy fuck like Larry Ellison who buys the company you used to have a good relationship with.

The world is now running away from Java in every possible place it's not irreplaceable (like, say, blu ray players)

Ahhh ... large corporations ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly aren't qualified to speak about Java because if you were you would know that the Java community thinks Oracle has been a great steward of Java, with the releases of Java 7, Java 8, Java EE 7, and the ongoing work of Java 9 and Java EE 8. They're doing what Sun couldn't: release. I don't work for Sun/Oracle and never have. I make my living developing enterprise and web apps in Java. FYI Java != applets.

Shenanigans!

[multimediavt]

'snydeq' isn't a member of the community, he's a paid writer. Go look at his submissions v. comments. This whole site is a sham anymore. This will be my last logged in post. Complete troll bait anymore. Have fun being cogs in a money making scheme. Like Facebook they're done making money off me.

Re:Shenanigans!

[GoddersUK]

"'snydeq' isn't a member of the community, he's a paid writer. Go look at his submissions v. comments." - Go and check what site he links to in every single one of his submissions... he fails at subtlety, that's for sure.

Re:Shenanigans!

[SparkleMotion88]

Agreed. This shit is just nerd clickbait.

Re:Shenanigans!

[wiredlogic]

No comments since 2010 + low enough UID = zombie account subverted to look like a legit user.

Re:Shenanigans!

[excelsior_gr]

As if people follow the links to the actual articles. You should be an old enough user to know that Slashdot is not the kind of news aggregator where you go to follow the links, it's the site where you go to listen to what other people have to say. It's more like: here's the topic; discuss.

User snydeq is a paid shill? Absolutely!
The status of java is an interesting topic for the community? Yes it is!

Disclaimer: I always enjoy a good argument.
BTW: The above is the reason why if the Slashdot comment mechanism ever breaks (Beta, I'm looking at you), it will mean the doom of this community.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Talonius]

I have a low UID but rarely comment. Mostly because by the time I get to an article, what's worth saying has been said. In short, I wouldn't hold that against him. The other evidence... eh, go wild.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Talonius]

After checking my history, I need to re-evaluate my definition of the word "rarely."

Re:Shenanigans!

[roger10-4]

Yeah, looking at syndeq's submissions...they're mostly links to "infoworld" articles. Looks like he's just trying to get extra traffic from the /. crowd.

Java was fantastic in 1995

[presidenteloco]

But the JEE framework went against some of the Java founders' quest for simplicity, and byzantine configuration-based frameworks were not brought out at dawn and shot soon enough, so they took over. And the language has some annoying verbosity and stuttering.

20 years later we need to move on. Less is more.

Re:Java was fantastic in 1995

[vsync64]

About the time it started getting called "Java EE" instead of "J2EE" they started stripping out most of the requirements for redundant default configurations. Some of the complexity is gratuitous, sure, but a lot is because it attempts to let developers handle more complex situations or scaling requirements (horizontal and/or vertical). I used to scoff years ago at some of the layers and knobs, until I found myself needing to use them, then I thought "these guys were smart to think of this in advance".

There are worse things than having a codebase -- already somewhat sanity-checked by the compiler, mind you -- that you can drop into an application server along with a small configuration file, and it can just plug into your preferred vendor, your preferred database, your system/user/network configuration.

I've played with a lot of frameworks and written others. Regardless of hype or abstract quality (and by the way I used to really detest Java as a language; now it's down to a mild dislike as they've improved it and things like Lombok have come along) it turns out I can just sit down and get work done with it and to some extent it helps my projects be "the right way" out of the box for later growth, and I have to respect that.

Re:Java was fantastic in 1995

[Anonymous Coward]

Love that Lombok reference! Thanks.

Been decades

[JustOK]

I've been saying for a couple of decades that Java is just a fad. I'll be right, sooner or later.

hmm

[buddyglass]

Java != Spring. Java != J2EE. At some point, when a language has been tweaked for, say, 20 years, do you get to the point where the addition of new language features (as opposed to libraries) should be a fairly rare thing?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point, when a language has been tweaked for, say, 20 years, do you get to the point where the addition of new language features (as opposed to libraries) should be a fairly rare thing?

As far as C++ is concerned, I don't think that Stroustrup ever got that memo.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

Agreed. Open question as to whether that's a net positive. My point is that the pace of language modifications should slow down as a language matures and all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. It's unrealistic to expect a constant rate of change.

Re:hmm

[petermgreen]

What gets me about java is that they add fancy new stuff like lambdas while leaving out basics like properties, operator overloading and user defined value types.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

My exposure to Java is in the context of Android development, so I haven't even touched anything newer than 1.6.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

What gets me about java is that they add fancy new stuff like lambdas while leaving out basics like properties, operator overloading and user defined value types.

Regarding properties and operator overloading, the language designers' stated concern that these features are frequently misused and often lead to difficult-to-read code means they are not likely to ever be implemented. I think I agree with them: I'd rather see myObject.setProperty(value) than myObject.property = value (for example) because in the latter I cannot easily be sure whether "property" is actually a property or instead has been made a field. Similar arguments apply to operator overloading.

Value types are apparently high on the priority list, which means we are likely to see them in Java 9.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy about the lack of operator overloading. I've never needed or wanted that. It ends up obfuscating more often than it ends up adding clarity. I write a fair amount of C++, and outside of "" for output (and that's so common now that it's the use "" for bit shifting that is the uncommon operation), I hardly ever use it. I prefer using an equals() method to overloading "==", honestly. Properties would be nice, but they're really just a thin layer of syntactic sugar, and my IDE generates getters/setters for me, so I don't really miss them that much. But user defined value types... yeah, that would be nice.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Aw, crap. One beer and I forget to translate my "<<".

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

System.out.println("I am a moron" + "maybe not?");

Just like C then?

[putaro]

Seriously, how much language "innovation" do we need? The platform is huge and there's more than enough third-party libraries to satisfy any needs.

Re:Just like C then?

[dwpro]

personally, I _love_ some of the innovations in the languages and platforms I've seen in my programming career that serve to reduce boilerplate/bloat and insert, standardize, and support useful libraries into the core language. Java will assuredly lose market share if Oracle doesn't provide good stewardship over the language and do all it can to augment the tooling, or competitors that provide a better programming experience will supplant them.

Re:Just like C then?

[ljw1004]

You need language innovation for the things that can't be expressed in libraries, e.g.

* async+await from F#/VB/C# (later adapted into C++, JS, Python).
* non-nullable reference types from Haskell/F# (later adapted into Swift)

Re:Just like C then?

[ADRA]

async+await seems a lot like features included in java.lang.Concurrent which has been in Java since 1.5 and as a popular third party add-on before that. Maybe they aren't language sugar in the same way level C# integrates with it, but it also means I can swap in various implementations of the provider if I found a more optimal solution for my specific problem area.

Re:Just like C then?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need language innovation for the things that can't be expressed in libraries, e.g.

* async+await from F#/VB/C# (later adapted into C++, JS, Python).
* non-nullable reference types from Haskell/F# (later adapted into Swift)

What the hell are you smoking?

All objects in Java are non-nullable reference types, so are references in C++. It is not exactly a new thing.

Re:Just like C then?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

We desperately need a language for OS work that is protected more than C is. C was written before millions/billions of network miscreants could attack your machine for days straight with no negative consequences. People still use PHP (shudder) because even though the language sucks, it fills a niche of 1 as a web page/web app language.

Java originally was Oak, a language for embedded set top boxes. It's much much bigger, much different now. Im sure in 1998 people said "we have all the third party libs that we need", then a new target developed, and people made new libraries for mobile devices.

Re:Just like C then?

[ljw1004]

The point of async+await is that they're COMPOSITIONAL with respect to other language constructs - e.g. you can put an await inside a for loop, or inside a try/catch block. It's impossible to do compositional asynchrony just as a library.

(and the evidence is in, that compositional asynchrony is a game-changer and significantly more productive than trying to do it with callbacks and libraries).

Re:Just like C then?

[stewsters]

We desperately need a language for OS work that is protected more than C is.

http://www.rust-lang.org/

Re:Just like C then?

[stewsters]

What does that give me that Java's futures doesn't?

Re:Just like C then?

[Anonymous Coward]

java.lang.Concurrent provides no facility for suspending a task and saving it's state, so it's absolutely no replacement for async+await.

Re:Just like C then?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Never heard of this, thanks much! Though obviously by posting earlier I have no opportunity to mod you up :(

Re:Just like C then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, not like the task can wait() until something else notify()'s it...

Re:Just like C then?

[Anonymous Coward]

C# had delegates and System.Threading all along. You could do all sorts of concurrency stuff, all the way back to 1.0 (January 2002). That was just before J2SE 1.4 was released (February 6, 2002). Concurrency utilities (java.util.concurrent) were added to the standard Java release with J2SE 5.0 (1.5, really), released September 30, 2004 (according to that same Java version history article).

Sure, it wasn't async/await. Not by a long shot. Then again, those old ways of doing concurrent stuff are far more flexible than async/await. Think of async/await as an abbreviated simple case implementation of the most common uses for concurrency. It's not comprehensive, and not meant to be. For complex uses, there's always System.Threading (or java.util.concurrent, if you're into self-torture).

And Java is absolutely not a competent alternative to C#.

Re:Just like C then?

[jd]

Oak was originally designed for household appliances.

D looks intriguing, certainly superior in theory to C++ or C#, but I'm seeing nothing substantial in it so far.

For other C derivatives, there's Aspect C and related attempts at adding high-level abstraction. On the other end of the spectrum, you've Silk and UPC - efforts to make parallelism simpler, safer and usable. Again, though, how many here have even got these compilers, never mind written anything in them?

For highly protected work, Occam-Pi is unbeatable. And almost unusable. Extraordinarily powerful, but extraordinarily formal. You could easily write an OS or virtual machine using it that could exploit multicore, SMP and clustering transparently. You just couldn't easily get it to do anything else, like hot-swap resources, add memory, access the busses, support RDMA, exploit hardware...

That's the rub. Most of what is needed in an OS is inherently unsafe. It's why there's so much interest in splitting operating systems into unsafe parts (which often need to be fast and low-level) and safe parts (the stuff that does all the managing and abstraction). So long as the unsafe parts are well-behaved with valid data AND the safe bits provably give only valid data (though it doesn't have to be provably correct), then the system is guaranteed to be stable.

You ideally want to split these up further. The safe bit should access an independent security kernel that handles all the access control, for example. The security kernel should be provably correct, which is a very different constraint than that imposed on other safe sections. Some sections of code should be able to self-replicate or migrate, to take advantage of resources rather than create bottlenecks. That would require greater emphasis on abstraction and adaptability, rather than validity or correctness.

No single language can handle this level of versatility. All languages obtain specific characteristics through constraints and freedoms. This means you need superior linkage between languages and optimization that takes into account that different paradigms are used to solve different problems and that there is insufficient data to optimize at compile time, that it has to be done at link time.

Re:Just like C then?

[t551]

Every object in Java is a nullable reference type: Object o = null; There, I nulled it.

Re:Just like C then?

[Anonymous Coward]

The platform is never enough. If you're creating a new program using all old techniques you have used, that new program isn't worth creating at all.

Python

[xtal]

Python has replaced Java for anything I used to do with it.

Javascript lives on.

IDEs are better. It's easier to port code. Much has been abstracted. I don't necessarily see where Java fits in the picture long term; it's been abandoned by Apple and Microsoft as a core language.

The beat goes on.

Re:Python

[Slashdot Parent]

Python has replaced Java for anything I used to do with it.

Python 2 or Python 3?

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know that!

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

Abandoned by Apple and Microsoft - lol what? Apple never used Java, they have always used their own languages. Same with Microsoft, they made C# specifically as a clone of Java. For year Java and C# have advanced in parallel as they just implement each others new features. Does that count as abandoning it? I feel like have the people writing on here either don't code or are just major fanboys of the language they learned 20 years ago and refuse to move on from..

Re:Python

[jbolden]

Abandoned by Apple and Microsoft - lol what? Apple never used Java, they have always used their own languages.

Not at all true. When OSX came out Apple had a series of 4 core programming modes: Classic (ran against an OSX9 emulator), C++/Carbon (ran directly against OSX), Objective-C/Cocoa and Java/SDK. Overtime the Java SDK got pulled further and further from the core. But there is no question that Apple was a huge Java proponent, many people often thinking it was the future of OSX development around 2001.

no way!

[slashmydots]

Seriously? LET IT DIE! It's the worst thing to ever happen to internet security. All they made was a slow, inefficient, awful launching pad for platform-independent viruses. Their updater now even loads crapware onto your computer by default. Their technology is a battery-draining, time-wasting, GPU-melting catastrophe that's right up there with Flash. They did next to nothing to fix their 3 years of straight security problems. What they did do broke millions of programs with every update. Nobody in their right mind is still using Java for anything corporate. Entire banks redid their online banking for security reasons after developing a Java-based solution. There is no need to revive software from such a bad company that has such a bad history.

Re:no way!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the worst thing to ever happen to internet security is humans and the assumptions they make about internet security being possible (or at the very least feasible). Seriously dude, stop blaming the hammer when your aim is off.

As someone who doesn't mind Java and actually thinks GUI frameworks (ala Swing, Qt, or even Dojo) are the only sensible approach to interface implementation, I resent that. Most of the internet isn't just crapware, it's complete and utter bullshit; get over it and go on thinking you're going to make millions writing boring webforms. It's funny how all of your other complaints about Java are my exact complaints about anything-web, when I KNOW I'm right. (For example, I have a 2001-era AMD Athlon XP DAW system that can record over 20 and playback over 100 tracks of 48k audio at a time, but it can't handle Facebook.)

Re:no way!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what it means to harden a system whether it is C++, Python, Java, Ruby, R, SQL. Are you a script kiddie ?

JAVA EE is not dead.

[JcMorin]

You means Java try to follow C# only adding same features couple years after? C# is open source (http://referencesource.microsoft.com/) both the framework and the compiler and ECMA and ISO standard. Java have none of that. Many companies can develop competing runtime environment (mono) with help of Microsoft while in Java you get sue. http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The face of Java is Minecraft

[Anonymous Coward]

You have an entire generation of young people learning to curse the name of Java thanks to Minecraft. Imagine the returns if they devoted even one developer as a liason to Mojang.

Oracle CAN'T kill JAVA.

[NemoinSpace]

Only Netcraft can do that.

Yay !

[Anonymous Coward]

Java had too much typing. What we need to enlarge the Cyber War Domain is less strong typing !

Let the Eternal Fire Burn !!!!!!!

It's that time of the month again

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because some faddy web technology has a few more job openings on Dice this quarter than it did previously? Java has stood the test of time, and there's no reason to think it's old and crusty just because it can do webslol as auto-magically. The truth of the matter is, companies only switch to the new hotness of webobullshit to attract younger talent, but when it turns out to suck (and it inevitably does), they resort back to something that's tried and true anyways.

Natural evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point adding features to a programming language subtracts from its usefulness. C++ passed this point long ago. What happens is that very smart and dedicated people after devoting long hours to discussions and meetings can hardly be satisfied by merely stopping some dubious extension, they need the psychological reward of adding to the language. Perhaps Java can avoid this fate.

Because of...?

[Ryyuajnin]

Oh boo-hoo Snydeq! You're just pissed cause nobody will explain to you what AOP means. Face it buddy: Spring & EE are gonna be here for a long long time, so get out your Kleenex and get prepare for a long and satisfying cry! When you're finished, go learn EE/Spring so you can go to work with the big boys.

JAVA is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish. Buggy, fickle, and full of security holes with nonstop updates which break older apps. It may be a panacea for developers, for an administrator who has to use tools coded in Java, it's a PITA.

Re:JAVA is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny because I think of administrators in the same way. Does anyone really like you guys?

Java Aint Dead

[ISoldat53]

I get a popup every other day with an update.

snydeq is spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

snydeq, the submitter of this story, has submitted infinitely more stories than he has commented on. each story links to the same site. it's evident that he's driving traffic to his site to generate revenue. this is fucked up.

posting anon because i modded up the other people pointing this out.

The promise of Java...

[theendlessnow]

Java - Write once. Run everywhere.
Java - Write once. Test everywhere.
Java - Write for one version. Run on one version.

Java - Write once. Run scared!

Re:The promise of Java...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does someone need a code peer review ? As if MicrosoftLand uses their customers to test their code.

Re:The promise of Java...

[Anonymous Coward]

Java - distribute a copy of the JRE; manually specify the location of JRE via JAVA_HOME in the application launcher.

bollocks

[Anonymous Coward]

The language still evolves. At slightly higher speed than C++. That's not a bad thing for a language. And the Java ecosystem is really healthy.

Re:bollocks

[real_b0fh]

yeah, it's much better today than the good old days when you had to have one version of the JVM for java application you used :)

Conflict of Interest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Andrew C. Oliver is also CEO of Open Software Integrators, a small consulting firm "custom application development and support for open source and cloud based technologies." A quick look at the company's press releases and other articles and blog posts from Oliver, reveal an overall negative bias against Oracle. Of course, it's very easy to have a negative bias against Oracle, because, well, it's Oracle after all. But it seems to me that Oliver's company which uses competing products from Oracle competitors like Red Hat and IBM, indirectly benefits (in a small way) by criticizing Oracle as a company and its products. He should have disclosed hist position at his company at the end of the article.

Is this what the masses want

[EmperorOfCanada]

With most programming languages there are 3 sorts of programmers: There are those 9-5 programmers who examine their paycheck more closely than their code; there are those programmers who have mastered the language and can do amazing things to make it dance, and there are the hard core insiders who give talks at language specific conferences and are on steering committees.

With some languages such as assembler the bulk of the programmers are in the middle category, while with a language like PowerBuilder the vast majority were in the first category. But what I have found with almost all languages there are very very few people in the steering committee category and they can be very detached from the first category.

With Java I would hazard a guess that the absolute majority of programmers are in the 9-5 category and about the only thing they want from the next version of Java is to "Please please please" don't break their code. Beyond that their needs are simple.

So Oracle can let Java Stagnate and it will probably actually please that first group for the short term. Obviously, this can be unhealthy for the language so even that first group will lose out if the language dies as they will then have to learn a whole new language when they thought they could spend a whole career in Java.

But one thing that I have also observed in many of the mega Java based projects is that they are often 1 or more versions of Java behind. Thus even newer versions of Java are totally irrelevant unless they solved some critical existing problem in the codebase of these mega projects. The real issue is that as Java moves on it becomes more and more of an effort to upgrade a mega codebase to a newer version making it eventually impossible under that company's coding management.

So if Oracle ever did want to push forward with new Java ideas then it should also push a huge program where zillions of programmers were taught to manage a version upgrade for a large codebase and given the tools to make it as painless as possible. Remember 9-5 programmers love free trips to sunny places.

Re:Is this what the masses want

[real_b0fh]

meh

Re:Is this what the masses want

[matfud]

I have worked with large java codebases. They are generally a few versions behind the latest release.
That is not a Java thing it occurs in all code.
Updating legacy code (or even slightly old code) can be a real pain in the arse. You have to fully test all the changes on the new compiler/runtime and mistakes will be made. Strong typing can actually help here as refactoring can tell you a lot about it (try refactoring java 1.3 to 1.5 (generics) and you will see how much was skipped over and just plain odd when you try to give things strong types)
And that is with java being remarkably backwards compatible (actually that is part of the problem as it does not require you to upgrade your code)

Moving up is not that hard but you end up with a lot of code that is old style and could be improved. Changing that takes money and time so often it is not done. There is a lot of code out there still on 1.3 (or 1.2) that still compiles and has to be bridged to best practices on 1.5, 1.7 And muh of it has no automated tests. It is painful but at least the compiler tends to tell you when you bugger up (a bit).

Do you think that other languages are immune to these problems? hee hee.

Re:Is this what the masses want

[EmperorOfCanada]

Well Python 2.7 to 3.X is certainly causing a stir. But with C++ I can still compile really old code. Usually the libraries are where trouble might brew. PHP is really compatible from version to version. I wasn't around during the 4.x-5.x wars but it was 5.x features that I had to have before I would use PHP anyway. Years ago when I was doing .Net I found that every version of .net twisted my code into knots.

So some languages are far better than others. But a whole other part of the game is the IDE and other tools. That can be a huge problem that can really choke a version upgrade to death in any language. On the other hand the latest version of the IDE can be the thing that pushes people into an upgrade.

Then there can be whole other motivations. Many people are learning C++ purely for Arduino. I learned Objective-C purely for iOS apps, but have since switched to C++ as I can then multi mobile platform my apps with ease; not to mention that I really hated Objective-C.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that Java started to fail when it went into a split of Standard Edition and Micro Edition

Under Java 8 ME
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/overview/javame/java-embedded-system-requirements-359229.html

  * Alignment with Java SE 8 language features and APIs, enabling more streamlined creation of embedded software through a unified development model between Java SE 8 and Java ME 8

Oracle has been trying to fix that...

Probably written by a PHP "programmer"

[msobkow]

Jave does what it needs to, and does it well. So does JEE.

There isn't a lot of "innovation" in the stack because the stack serves it's primary purpose quite well, and is used by tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of websites to deliver business functionality.

And that is, of course, the crux of the matter: functionality. Business is not interested in jumping on the latest and greatest craze just for the sake of doing so. Business wants stability. It wants predictability. It wants reliability.

Not "innovation" for the sake of being different.

Re:Probably written by a PHP "programmer"

[jd]

Stability, predictability and reliability could be done with Erlang, Occam, Eiffel, Smalltalk or Ada.

Business could have build "enterprise" applications with any of these. Most existed before Java or, indeed, the web. Servlets could have churned out WAIS or Gopher data for businesses. Graphics, via SGI's VRML, Apple's Postscript or the ancient GKS standard, could have given you everything that Swing delivered. Not that businesses use Swing, as a rule.

Portable applications in the form of Tcl/Tk packages could have provided everything Java applets did. Not that anyone uses applets either.

It should be self-evident that absolutely bugger all of the usual explanations hold water. If the explanations were valid, the role would already have been filled and Java would have never taken off.

Businesses flocked to Java and not to any other technology. Even technologies pushed by very large corporations. Businesses liked, and like, Java. That is obvious. "Why" is not obvious, Java does nothing that couldn't be done better in other ways. It isn't done in other ways, it's done in Java. There will be a sound reason for this, but it won't involve stability, reliability or predictability.

Oh Really ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears to me that these "quick&dirty" languages like C and PHP are currently salting the lands (it's called "Cyber War Domain" by the U.S. military) which grow all the nice flowers of the IT business. And you seriously want less type safety ?

what about android?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know its not Java in a pure sense but its close enough. Think all those devices are just going to magically disappear? What's the alternative for mobile? C#? I know alot of mobile games use C but I don't think that's practical for all mobile development.

maybe google should buy Java off of Oracle but I doubt Oracle will sell it to them for a reasonable price. And Google hasn't really been the best at software development.

Re:what about android?

[jd]

Android is not Java. Android is Linux with a JVM set up as an "other binary format" engine.

Re:what about android?

[Lennie]

Wasn't it made clear that: one of the things Oracle wanted to do is sue Google over Android when they bought Sun ?

That didn't work out, though. So their use for 'buying' Java has diminished greatly.

So, I think Oracle will eventually just say: we don't care about Java anymore.

This could be a good thing, but might be a bad thing.

Al though, most of it is open source/free software now, so it might be OK.

C is replaced

[Anonymous Coward]

C has been replaced with C++, C# and Java.

Re:C is replaced

[MightyMartian]

There's a helluva lot of C code being written and maintained out there, so no, not even C has been replaced.

Re:C is replaced

[Vellmont]

C has been replaced with C++, C# and Java.

In some cases, yes. But that doesn't mean C is dead or dying. It's just not as dominant as it once was. Languages are like living things, they compete with other languages for space. There's still a TON of applications written in C. The linux kernel is a major example. C isn't as dominant as it once was, but that's a natural development of diversity. Greater diversity doesn't mean the death of what was once dominant, only that what was once dominant fills a smaller niche.

Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[raymorris]

I use a few Java programs on my desktop, which has 16GB of RAM. One program I use is a little editor / mini-IDE for microcontrollers which have 4k of memory. While writing these 4K programs, Java will largely lock up the machine for 30 seconds, probably while it's doing GC.

You seem to be suggesting that 16GB of RAM isn't enough to edit kilobytes of text. Is that what Java fans generally think? In the meantime, I'm programming in simple, effective languages that work quite well with 250,000 times less memory.

Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[the grace of R'hllor]

I can write a one-liner script that will bring a Unix machine to a crunching slowdown. Stupid in, stupid out.

If your little editor / mini-IDE craps out your machine, it is poorly written. Noticeable garbage collection will only be triggered if your Old Gen memory space is too full, which means you're maintaining references in memory which you should not (circular references are fun-- in someone else' code). Also possible is that it's simply not updating the UI while running a compile script, which is definitely bad programming. Blaming Java for that is idiotic.

Disclaimer: I write high-performance Java applications using Spring. Also maintaining a pile of spaghetti that has grown over the past ten years, that still performs adequately.

Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[MightyMartian]

Jesus. I'm running the Kepler version of Eclipse on a five year old Windows 7 box with 4gb of RAM and I'm not experiencing anything like that kind of slowdown.

Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the editor/IDE 64bit? If not, then your total RAM size isn't really relevant. I'm not a "fan" of any programming language (the concept itself is silly), but it's possible to write horribly inefficient programs in just about any language.

Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[Yaztromo]

I use a few Java programs on my desktop, which has 16GB of RAM. One program I use is a little editor / mini-IDE for microcontrollers which have 4k of memory. While writing these 4K programs, Java will largely lock up the machine for 30 seconds, probably while it's doing GC.

Check your settings. For better or worse, Java doesn't run like other native programs (on most platforms at least) -- the maximum heap space it will allow programs to use is fixed at runtime (i.e.: it won't grow dynamically as memory allocations are requested). On the system I'm sitting at right now, the default is set to just under 2GB (Win7, JDK 1.7.0_45 (both 64-bit), 8GB RAM). No matter how much actual memory my application wants (or needs), this is the maximum that can be allocated for objects on the heap. Attempting to allocate any new objects once this 2GB of heap space won't use any free RAM available on the system; it will instead trigger garbage collection.

Additionally, with Java 7 at least, there are seven different garbage collection algorithms. The default is the Parallel Scavenger Collector, which is a "stop the world" collector. You might find on your system you have fewer pauses if you enable the Concurrent Mark/Sweep collector, in conjunction with the Parallel Copy Collector. Concurrent Mark/Sweep runs in the background, and only stops all application threads if it can't keep up with demand.

Tuning those should help with your specific performance issues. I completely recognise that none of this should be necessary in a well-written application; unfortunately for all too many Java developers, "I don't need to worry about garbage collection" also seems to mean "I don't need to care about the lifecycle of my objects", which of course isn't true. There are a lot of badly written Java applications out there, and in some ways understanding how Java handles memory is actually harder than understanding memory allocation in a lower-level language like C (Garbage Collection makes things pretty complex), and all too often I run into Java developers who simply have no idea how the JVM manages these things. IDEs for embedded systems always seem to be particularly bad for this. That's not entirely Java's fault -- you can write memory-efficient Java applications, it's just that too many Java developers (and frequently their managers) seem to think you can ignore memory issues with Java because it has Garbage Collection, as if it's some magical solution to memory allocation/deallocation.

Yaz

Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[Anonymous Coward]

I can write a one-liner script that will bring a Unix machine to a crunching slowdown. Stupid in, stupid out.

Really? If you can do so as an unprivileged user, you should file a bug. Or better still, write a "zero day DOS attack" hype-filled story for Slashdot .

Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program

[Anonymous Coward]

Not any of my Unix machines. A long time ago most Linux installations didn't have any ulimits set by default, so it was super simple to fork bomb or force it to swap out. But that's changed.

And "high-performance" is relative. I write high-performance network servers in C, I _always_ disable swap on all of my servers, and I always disable over commit. It's not high-performance if you can't make performance commitments, and it's really hard to do that with Java because of GC. It's hard enough to do in C, but mostly because of virtual memory, and by disabling swap and over commit you can mitigate those issues.

That said, "high-performance" is relative, and there are innumerable amazing "high-performance" web services built using Java. But you can also build them using Python or Lua or almost any other language, including *ugh* PHP.

In my book, though, if you can't make it sing on a single box, and do it in a way that is resilient, then it's not that high-performance. You can scale out any service across multiple servers as long as it uses a few well-known patterns. But if it screams on a single, resource constrained server, it'll really scream when you scale it out.

Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of Java's security nightmares result from being Bloated Up by all sorts of hipsters. Less features would be better, from a security perspective. Do we really need reflection ? Does Cobol have reflection ?

Java actually suffers from the Milk-and-wool-and-egg-giving-animal problem. It does lots of stuff somehow, but most of it in a mediocre way.

Re:Actually

[jd]

Most of what you're complaining about is in the standard library, not the core language. The standard library is semi-open, you can alter the code, rip out what you don't want. Only the core language is Java, the rest is just a programming aid.

As for what COBOL has, Admiral Hopper was running software on a non-networked sequential architecture. This is rather different from operating in a multicore SMP-architectured server farm. There is nothing complicated about parallelism, but naivety and self-blinding are two great ways to make every mistake in the book - and then some.

Java stagnated UNTIL Oracle took over

[musicmaker]

The JCP under Sun was completely broken. Java 7 was YEARS late. Under Oracle, we got Java 7 released, OpenJDK sorted out, and Java 8 released with Java 9 on its way. As a Scala developer, I don't feel like the Java world has stagnated, but then the Open Source "Community" has been proclaiming the death of Java since Java 1.5. The Open Source "Community" could learn a hell of a lot from the Java community, like how to actually have and maintain large open source libraries that work for years and years. How to build systems and platforms that mature and age and function for decades without needed to be rewritten. I'd bet there are far far more programmers developing on Java than there are for Linux as a desktop OS, and I shudder to think how a post submitted to Slashdot that declared Linux as a Desktop OS is dead would fare.

Re:Java stagnated UNTIL Oracle took over

[Anonymous Coward]

The Open Source "Community" could learn a hell of a lot from the Java community, like how to actually have and maintain large open source libraries that work for years and years. How to build systems and platforms that mature and age and function for decades without needed to be rewritten.

HAHAHAHA! Troll harder.

Why is that scary?

[mbkennel]

Modern Fortran (as in Fortran 2003+) is a very good programming language for its domain and exceeds many alternatives in useful, natural expressive power, ease of use, and computational efficiency.

It just so happened that archaic Fortran was easier to transform into something good than other legacy languages.

Re:Why is that scary?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Its scary because FORMULA TRANSLATION involves formulas, which implies Math. Why, you'd have to be some kind of super genius to understand it. With all of the algebra and limited use of mathematical symbols instead of plain English. Not like nice cobol that spells everything out for you, why even a business analyst can understand it!

There are SOME things that Oracle does properly.

[emil]

SPARC: "I am going to make a promise to you: By this time next year, that Sparc microprocessor will run the Oracle database faster than anything on the planet.". SPARC now beats x86.

RDB: Enough said.

Serious Question What are the advantages of COBOL?

[androidph]

I have IT friends from various consulting firms that are still using COBOL or RPG, they seem to be like fan boys telling me that no new technology could ever replace the mainframe. They told me that some big credit card company before, tried to migrate their application to a Unix/JEE but failed. And they told me failed migration from mainframe is happening everywhere and all industries. My guess is the system that was migrated to is already very stable, and migration would introduce bugs that may cause manager to dismiss the migration. So my question is, if for example you start an new project, what instances where it is still best to use COBOL/RPG?

Java still owns all else

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked Java EE webservers were owning pretty much everything in bechmarks.
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9

farewell java

[cmdr_tofu]

http://preview.images.memegene...

Re:farewell java

[cmdr_tofu]

Actually, I don't dislike Java at all, but there is a special place in hell for any vendor that says, "A crappy java applet is all they need to manage the only interface needed". Java applets should have died a long time ago.

Acquiring Sun was not about Java, but about Oracle

[MouseR]

I dont the article looks at the reason why Oracle bought Sun.

Sure, the hardware itself was icing on the cake but the basic reality is that Oracle has an enormous investment in Sun hardware by optimizing the DBs for that platform, but mostly, because the software stack has an even heavier investment in Java for the processing of the data itself as well as middleware. If you think PLSQL is important to oracle, Java has taken an as-much important role in treating the data and managing apps.

When Sun was failing and about to hit the dust, no price was too high for Oracle to save that Hardware & Software investment. The absolute-next worse thing to a competitor (like IBM, SAP etc) buying it and giving therm control over Oracle's Java investment through license or platform direction.

I'm convinced the buyout was an absolute critical must for Oracle. Does that mean they want to push the platform forward? I can't answer that. They did ditch JavaFX and roll some of it back into J7. But one thing for sure, they wont let it die any way or another.

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle but these are not Oracle's opinions. That's my opinion only. I do NOT work anywhere near related activities to the server stack, Sun hardware or Java code. I do end-user native app developments that make use of some Java middleware.

Java is here to stay

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 1000s of programming languages. Pick the right one for the job.
.
Do you know Hadoop is a big hit in Big Data ?
Do you know what Hadoop is written in ?
Do you know JVM is putting in invokeLater(?) to work with node JS ?
Do you know support for Lambdas/parallelism is coming and a JavaScript interpreter ?
There are how many JUGs ?
And how many java developers world wide ?
Do you know there is a consortium leading the JSRs ? Such as Red Hat, etc ?
Was it github or Ohloh who said Java has the most code activity? Java is in the top five.
.
Java is here to stay for some time. Is this article sponsored by someone doing metrics or a study ? Some gov-ie looking to make a mandate in government?

Your post clearly written by a Java "programmer"

[Anonymous Coward]

People outside the Java world often prefer to use either function or functions rather than functionality. We also usually don't refer to nebulous collections of disparate enterprises as though "business" were a single sentient entity. Not everything has to be a class, or a noun for that matter.

See, for example, your post could have been written this way:

Java and JEE are able to serve the needs of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of business websites.

And that is, of course, the crux of the matter: function. Businesses are not interested in jumping on the latest and greatest craze just for the sake of doing so. Businesses want stability. They want predictability. They want reliability.

Not "innovation" for the sake of being different.

Of course, since I prefer programming in classless procedural language, I would have written it this way:

Empirically, Java appears to be sufficient for required business web functions.

But of course once you parse it down that way, it turns out that Java isn't functionally distinguishable from PHP... a thought which may cause Java programmer head explosions.

thanks for the info

[raymorris]

Thanks for that detailed information. I have another Java app that I use daily so optimizing the settings you mentioned might make a big difference.

Re:thanks for the info

[Yaztromo]

You're welcome -- glad to help.

I should note that I am assuming that with 16GB of RAM you're running a 64-bit OS. If you're running a 32-bit OS (with PAE to access all the extra memory), you're going to be more constrained. While an OS with PAE can access quite a lot of RAM, 32-bit processes are still limited to a 32-bit virtual memory space (with a maximum addressable memory of 4GB, but functionally less on some OS's depending on whether or not they do things like mapping kernel memory into process memory space (Windows, I'm looking at you...)). On some OS's, Java also expects that the heap memory space will be completely contiguous (virtually, not physically), which may not seem like a problem until you run into a virus scanner or some such that loads some library resident into every single process ("DLL Injection") at the 2GB mark or some other fixed virtual memory location below the maximum (yeah, I'm looking at Windows again. Had this one bite a customer pretty badly a few years back who for some odd reason still insisted on running 32-bit Windows servers). 64-bit OS's can still support DLL Injection, but typically the injected memory location is so insanely high within VM (quite a large amount higher than you can physically install in your typical system), that it doesn't cause any problems.

The point being (before I go off into too long of a rant), on the off chance you're still running a 32-bit OS and 32-bit Java (I'm reasonably sure you can run 64-bit Java on OS X 1.6, even when booting with the 32-bit kernel), tuning may only take you so far for Java applications that are really memory hungry -- you'll still hit a wall well before even 1/4 of your installed RAM is used. In that case, upgrading to a 64-bit OS and 64-bit Java is highly recommended, if possible.

(As an aside, this is actually one reason why Android handset developers were quick to jump into using quad-core processors. When programming Android using Java, all of these memory and garbage collection issues arise, in a package with less RAM and less processing power than a standard PC. The best way to handle being able to create responsive applications under GC in such a model is to do as much of the GC as you can in the background on one or more independent cores to minimize whole-application pauses. Contract this to iOS which uses retain/release cycles (or better yet, Automatic Retain Counting, aka ARC) where memory management is either hand-coded by the developer, or resolved at compile time (in the case of ARC), requiring no GC at all).

Yaz

PHP is too compatible from version to version

[marxmarv]

The mysql module should have been shot before it was ever included. A database interface layer that doesn't support bound parameters is criminally irresponsible, and people who write such things should be held criminally responsible.

Re:PHP is too compatible from version to version

[EmperorOfCanada]

But think of all the out of work SQL injection hackers? But I still see code where people use a bound parameters technology this way:

sql="SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE ID="+user_id;

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

Java Death Party

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S ABOUT TIME

Who wants to enter the raffle for a chance at breaking ground on Java's grave?

Re: [OT] tea time

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit. I always thought it was "tee time" (golfing instead of drinking tea).

Spring is "over"?

[ayesnymous]

Indeed shows 3000 job listings for Spring in my area. Doesn't seem over to me. Anyways what has supposedly replaced Spring?

Needed innovation: SLIM JAVA DOWN

[Theovon]

Right now, if I want to ship an app that uses Java 8 features, I have to bundle an extra 40 megs of runtime. This is because Java 8 isn't yet the default. An extra 40 megs is stupid for simple apps. The runtime is an order of magnitude larger than the application. That's stupid.

If Java wants to innovate, they can find a way to maintain all the existing features and backward compatbility while using less space. That would be a worthy project and worth while for Java 9. They can make things smaller and perhaps even faster by rewriting things that are overly bloated.

Oracle is not Java -- Java is not Oracle

[dbeberman]

Full disclosure, we are a Java bytecode toolchain and runtime, and Java language runtime environment vendor. Thus I am completely biased. Don't know what the statement "Java core" is dead means. We offer a true hard realtime environment, competitive with, and far more reliable than C, C++, or probably anything else short of Ada. We are the leadership on the JCP Realtime Specification for Java (RTSJ) JSR, and participate in several other JSRs. We offer a lightweight process, multithreaded, multicore, secure, dynamic application framework product. We have a feature rich product suite, and continue to enhance it. Would say that the general interest in using Java continues to grow as more and more management realizes that depending on weak languages like C or C++ costs their companies in development, maintenance, and product support. Another huge advantage of Java bytecodes is all the other languages that compile to it, and more being developed all the time (e.g. JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Scala, Clojure). I would challenge anyone to come up with a wider adopted, scalable, safe and reliable system than Java bytecodes, Java runtime, Java APIs, the Java language, the other languages, the application frameworks (e.g. OSGi), the vast amount of open source software, the number of universities using Java for teaching and research, and the vast amount of developer tools. Such a comment about Java belies near-zero knowledge of the software development community. I would go further to suggest that if the kernel development for Linux and similar OS's that are all C code related, were removed from a comparison of use of languages, the use of Java would far dominate the use of C. But as I said at the outset, I am biased. Maybe there is another runtime environment, community and language that is competitive and a better choice than Java...

Java deserves Oracle!

[bbsalem]

The design of class libraries by Sun Microsystems was such a disaster that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle seems most fitting as an idiot like Larry Ellison, could kill off the bad idea. That doesn't mean Java is dead, it means that it can fork and someone else will fix the disaster, or it means the the JRE will be an unchanging and silent platform under some better conceived language. I don't know if Julia is that answer or not, but something like that could extend the life of the JRE.

I doesn't surprise me at all that Oracle would squander what it got from Sun. I never thought much of Larry Ellison or his company, they have about as much imagination and creatively as a vegetable!

An area where Java applets continue to thrive

[gwolf]

I still continue to see Java applets being widely used in tasks that require trusted signatures — Say, filling in the tax declarations in my country, or submitting the grades for my students. For both actions, we must use a x.509 client certificate, and for both actions, quite different entities do not trust client-side Javascript validation, Flash code, or anything like that — Only Java applets.

Which quite sucks, right, but anyway there'sa point to them.

Re:An area where Java applets continue to thrive

[arglebargle_xiv]

I still continue to see Java applets being widely used in tasks that require trusted signatures â" Say, filling in the tax declarations in my country, or submitting the grades for my students. For both actions, we must use a x.509 client certificate

You're in Estonia? Just trying to figure out which country actually uses client certificates for tax filing.

Re:An area where Java applets continue to thrive

[gwolf]

Mexico.

Re:An area where Java applets continue to thrive

[arglebargle_xiv]

And the tax system still works? The only other country I know of that tried it abandoned it fairly quickly when they realised that their ability to collect tax revenue was being destroyed by being tied to X.509 client certificates.

Microsoft killed Java in the browser...

[patniemeyer]

We might live in a much different world today if Microsoft had not *deliberately* set out to kill Java in the browser in the mid 90s. MS saw Java and Netscape as a threat to their business model so they licensed the technology from Sun, put it in their browsers and then made sure that it would remain slightly broken and never be updated. Everyone in the industry saw this coming and at the time Sun talked about how great their lawyers were and how they had compatibility clauses in the contract, etc.... Microsoft's lawyers were better apparently.

Microsoft left a slightly broken and very early 1.x release of Java in their browsers for years and years. The motivation was clear in court documents during the antitrust litigation with quotes from people inside Microsoft saying things like: we have to ''pollute'' Java in the browser to keep it from being truly cross platform.

Imagine what the world would be like today if, instead of edging ever closer to a full fledged programming model in the browsers based on JavaScript (which was created to be glue to put Java into HTML, not to be a programming language) - if instead we had 20 years of browsers with native Java VMs, written in and extensible by Java... There is no doubt we would have had the kind of applications we take for granted today (AJAXy things like gmail and maps) 15 years ago... and a generation of developers would not have grown up with this mess that we left them in HTML and JS.

- Pat Niemeyer (Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates)

Re:Microsoft killed Java in the browser...

[Dogtanian]

Very good point; one whose importance I should perhaps have been more aware of (I didn't have a PC nor access to a PC nor the Internet circa 1995 to 98, so perhaps my lack of firsthand experience at the time this was unfolding blinded me to this factor).

Shame this wasn't posted earlier on when the discussion was still relatively new and prominent, but it's a post I'll happily reference the next time this comes up.

Yes; it's easy to forget what a bunch of cynical, destructive *****s MS were- and still are, given the chance. Oh wait... no, it's not.

Unfortunately, Java is now in the hands of a company that makes MS look.... well, okay, I'm not sure they make MS look good, but Oracle's motto should be "We like being evil, and we're not bothered what you think". :-/

Oracle - the reason Python thrives and Java wilts

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Larry Ellison scares software architects who fear their Java products will eventually become ensnared in some expensive IP licensing, comparable to the Oracle Database model. Python is truly open source and has the support of Google to keep it so. Which company do you trust more to "do no evil" in this regard? Ruby is also a good alternate choice as well, but it is clear that Python is the insider's favorite in 2014.

Paginated articles..why?

[utopianmonk]

You know the article is a click bait and noise when its split across multiple web-pages. There is no reason in this time and age to do that. Wake up this guy, its 2014!