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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[0123456]

It's like Java, only not terrible.

And only runs on Windows.

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.

"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"

[Horshu]

Libraries.

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.

This is the best case scenario

[netsavior]

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

Java EE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Java EE is dead

Really?

I guess I missed that.

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.

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!

[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?

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.

Where are the big ideas?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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."

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.

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.

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.

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.