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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.'
Other than that, the only use I can see for Java on the desktop is to enable machines to get infected with malware.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
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.
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?
Oracle can't figure out how to screw over java, and we are complaining?
Really?
I guess I missed that.
Some random nobody proclaims death of Java. Thousands of companies that do depend on Java EE just vanished in puff of logic.
Oracle can't figure out how to charge $5000 per CPU per year for Java, so it's not really interested.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
Personally, I'd rather not see Oracle get any big ideas. They usually end badly.
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Hey, COBOL still lives... Sorta
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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)
'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.
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I've been saying for a couple of decades that Java is just a fad. I'll be right, sooner or later.
rewriting history since 2109
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?
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
..don't panic
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.
"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.
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.
Only Netcraft can do that.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I get a popup every other day with an update.
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.
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.
Java - Write once. Run everywhere.
Java - Write once. Test everywhere.
Java - Write for one version. Run on one version.
Java - Write once. Run scared!
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
That's true, but there's a difference between an open source support contract and the way in which Oracle does a support contract.
I thought lawyers were a profit center based on the statement regarding all of the lawsuits........
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
Cobol is nothing; have you heard the latest about FORTRAN and Big Data?
http://developers.slashdot.org...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!
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.
Bye!
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.
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.
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.
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)....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
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.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
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.
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.
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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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.
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.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
That's funny because I think of administrators in the same way. Does anyone really like you guys?
And apparently the API, considering they have successfully sued Google for implementing their own version of Java.
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 :)
"Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be selective on who it makes friendship with"
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.
indeed.
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 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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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...
There's a helluva lot of C code being written and maintained out there, so no, not even C has been replaced.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And Java is the new COBOL : verbose language, large install base, mainly corporate users, bored developers...
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.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
http://preview.images.memegene...
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
AccountKiller
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Android is not Java. Android is Linux with a JVM set up as an "other binary format" engine.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
New things are always on the horizon
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.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Old languages never die, they just stop being hyped.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
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.
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.
Indeed shows 3000 job listings for Spring in my area. Doesn't seem over to me. Anyways what has supposedly replaced Spring?
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...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
Sounds like your ideas on development are just as atavistic and misguided as the ones you have regarding economics. I see a trend here.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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...
dbeberman www.aicas.com
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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?
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)
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!
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The number of dead languages will vary considerably based on which definition of "dead" you use.
Quod dixerit ad illum, infantem!
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).