Slashdot Mirror
Java Success Stories
gark writes "The Java Lobby has a
weblog on Java success stories. Many of the successful applications are servlet based, and several use Apache JServ. Perhaps WORA [write once, run anywhere] really has been achieved, at least for server apps."
Where the guy shouts all sorts of admonishing remarks at his dog; and all the dog hears is...
"Blah blah Java blah blah blah Java".
Although there are certain well known problems with using Java on the client side (speed issues, GUI issues, etc...) the company where I am am doing some work at currently has had some great success doing work with Java servlets. We were able to take some code written and tested on WinNT and Solaris and get it up and running on a Linux box in less than two hours from the time we took a completely bare box, install the OS, and have the app up and running, with absolutely no changes to the code. I don't care how portable your ANSI C code is, but that is almost unheard of.
Now if only we had a spare IBM mainframe sitting around to try it under that environment...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I work at Webstakes.com ( http://www.webstakes.com ) - we're a very popular site, on the Media Metrix 500 and so forth...our entire operation runs on Apache JServ and we're very happy with it. We actually migrated from a Java-based application server and this is much better. I'm the UNIX system administrator, and in the past I have worked with many commercial application servers, from Broadvision to NetDynamics, and I have to say Apache JServ blows everything else away...I love how flexible Apache is and how JServ fits into it...it makes me wonder why so many financial companies have such a love for Netscape Enterprise server or IIS
Open source application servers are the best - I can tell you from personal experience over the past couple of years...they really blow away commercial application servers. My friend has mod_perl on Elance.com and I'm curious as to how that's working out...I know PERL is a very web-friendly language, maybe even a little more than Java.
A major part of the game in introducing any new
technology to the MIS-managers is producing a
panoply of success stories in the "trade press".
If you read back issues of "Information Week"
"Datamation" etc. you will find endless gushing
stories of successful implementations of
(pick the fad of the last 10 years).
What is *never* covered are the projects that
got abandoned, canceled, or crashed and burned
in some other way... these are politely buried
and not talked about... the programmers fired,
and the memory traces remain only in the minds
of the survivors - again never talked about, and
never included in survey tabulations...
The only way to find about project failures is to
talk to seasoned survivors over a beer, or
to read anti-patterns books or occasionally
the halloween issue of Datamation - and even
then they never give names and places...
Which is precisely why Sun is pulling stupid stunts like pulling Java out of ECMA stadardization and trying to charge royalties for the use of the J2EE logo. Sun realizes that Java is A Big Thing now, so they want to get their cut, one way or another.
It's the same old bait-n-switch we've grown to know and loathe from Microsoft, only with a different brand underneath.
These little shenanigans, along with the way Sun is milking the Open Source cow with their so-called SCSL and their treatment of the Blackdown fiasco has got them on my sh*t list but good. They had better realize pretty quickly that the industry isn't going to stand anymore for the same old tricks that Microsoft's been pulling all these years and that Sun isn't anywhere near as powerful and influential as Microsoft to be able to pull them off.
It's enough to want to make me give up Java and learn Perl... Well, ok, maybe Python...
Who woulda thunk it a couple of years ago that a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work would today be saying, "At least there's IBM to look to for real support of Java on Linux without trying to screw us over."
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
People who say that there are no Java apps miss the point. For the non-server applications, they're pretty much right: there are very few end-user, shrink-wrap apps written in Java. Why? Because portability is not an issue for most software companies. If it runs on Win95 and NT, then it's good to go.
However, a large number of server-side applications use Java servlets or the related JSP technology. Bought a computer on line? If it was from Compaq, HP, or a host of others (such as those listed at http://corporate.pcorder.com/customers/), then you benefited from the speed and robustness of the Java platform. Even the Ford e-commerce site, which Bill Gates so lovingly demonstrated in his Comdex keynote, is based on Java (and runs on NT).
And don't count corporate software, either. Lotus Notes web mail runs through a Java applet, and companies like Oracle are increasing their use of Java everyday.
The fact is, whenever you need fast development, good networking capabilites, and (I hate to say it) 'enterprise' support, Java is a good candidate. WORA is just a small part of it.
One last thing. With the advent of GCJ, it is possible that more native software will be written in Java. This will be a huge boon because it will allow GUI apps to run natively on a large numeber of platforms without changing a line of code. Java, I think, is a good argument for having a large, all-encompassing library (GUI, networking, database, ORB, etc). If only it was so easy with everything else...
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auntfloyd
My question is this:
Java is supposedly slow. Is this a matter of the speed of the computer? Will Java's ponderous pace become irrelevant as processors become faster? Is it something more inherent in the language???
hoser: Slashdot reader since 1987.
Java is usable in the servlet arena, however Java has two things that cause people like me to choose other solutions (C/C++ is what I am using, perl is another good choice, as well as Python, and plenty of other tools which I forgot to name.)
The first problem with it is its lack of speed. On a server answering a ton of transactions, the JVM needs to have some sort of native machine code cache where Java bytecodes are stored as native code for sake of speed. What would make this a nonissue for servers would be a PCI card (preferably two models -- one 32-bit, one 64-bit wide, both able to select 33/66 Mhz depending on the main bus speed) with a good Java bytecode processor. If these were made inexpensive enough, and put on the motherboards on new SPARC boxes as coprocessers, this would solve the slowness problem.
The second problem is the bad perception of Java. Two big whammies -- Blackdown, and the pulling out of the standards committee hit Java quite close together.
Not to say that Java is a lost cause. When Java was the hot thing amongst computer groups, every vendor with something that runs a CPU got some sort of JVM out for it. So, the write-once, run anywhere thing does still apply. Java 1.0 was, for the most part, a toy, but with the latest iteration, it really has matured into something usable.
Personally, I really don't know as much as I should about Java, but I have seen some very cool things done with it (www.jars.com has a good amount of examples of this, and the main application that drives www.hushmail.com is another good example.) to write it off as a toy language.
As for Sun, its a mixed bag. They come up with some good things, and then trip on themselves. I don't want to write them off just yet.
Searching FRESHMEAT for JAVA returns 378 links, and they're almost all GPL. That's more impressive to me
anyway... I think the most impressive java app I've used is NetBeans (now owned by Sun). That was the first java app that made me really believe that significant java apps were on the way.
Here's a list of related topics I'd like more slashdot stories on:
ZOPE success stories
comparison of slashdot-alike web-based discussion apps like squishdot, etc.
compare and contrast of OPENSOURCE application servers
Finally an article on the server-side successes of Java. IMHO, Java servlets are the best thing that has happened to Java since its inception, but for reasons completely unknown to me, Java-bashing has taken its place next to Microsoft bashing as an official Slashdot sport. Perhaps the reason is the early failure of Java when Sun touted it as the single platform that will replace everything. Anybody else remember the Java ring and the Java OS?
Dear fellow Java-basher Slashdotters: I know most of you have very little free time on your hands, but please set aside a couple of days to take a look at this exciting server side technology, Java servlets. It is truly write-once, run anywhere; it's a widely accepted industry standard, almost all popular databases and application servers support it, and Java is a very good OO language after all. Take a look at some nice servlet tutorials or better, O'Reilly's servlets book, download the awesome Tomcat or Apache JServ to run with your Apache Web server, get the latest JDK from Blackdown or even better, IBM's JDK, add Jikes for good measure, and explore the beautiful world of Java servlets. Sun's site completely relies on Java servlets, Yahoo uses servlets for some portions of the site, a host of smaller Web sites and e-commerce companies completely rely on servlets and/or JSP (which is based on servlet technology), (epinions.com, mercata.com come to my mind; there are lots of others)
Whatever server-side programming technology you're using, you will like servlets. Most likely you will want to forget about CGI.pm, sell your books about Netscape's proprietary server-side JavaScript on Ebay, erase memories of hours of fiddling with ISAPI/NSAPI extensions, shred your printouts of ASP error message explanations from the Microsoft knowledge base, and lament about the time you spent posting aimlessly on every bulletin board about those pesky, undocumented Oracle functions of PHP. You will easily have time for all these when you start to use servlets.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
I developed and wrote WebMacro which is a free (GPL) Java servlet framework.
I use Java for about half my web projects. The other half of the time I use perl. In my opinion, here are the strengths of Java for server side development:
1-- It allows clean and clear design. Since you can declare compiler-enforced interfaces, you can easily separate out functionality in well defined chunks. This allows you to plan for the long term, hand different parts of the project to different people, and so on. This tends to be what makes me choose Java over Perl: If I want to enforce a long term design (such as re-usable constraints on busisness logic), or break the project up into several different segments, then I choose Java over Perl.
2-- It's fast and scalable. Java is often criticized as being slow, but on the server, it's not. It's fairly fast compared to things like perl (which are usually fast enough to begin with), and add to that the threaded nature of servlets, plus the built in scalability, and you have a big performance gain over other scripted solutions. In particular the ability to automatically distribute a single servlet across multiple webservers, without modifying the servlet itself at all, is a big win. You can be sure that whatever you do will scale.
3-- You do need to make an effort to keep your HTML and your SQL and your Java program code separate form one another. The whole reason for using Java was to get clean, well designed code, and you don't have that when you have HTML obscuring your servlet. This is what prompted me to write WebMacro, which is an HTML template system, but you could also do this with FreeMarker, or XSLT, or if you are very careful, with JSP.
4-- Write once, run anywhere is fairly real on the servlet. I routinely develop under FreeBSD, deploy on FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux, and I have about half the users of WebMacro running it under NT, even though I myself hardly ever use NT. And it all works.
5-- On the downside, the free Java solutions don't appear to work very well for servlets. I have had lots of trouble with kaffe, and the free JVM's are not as fast as the non-open ones. This is too bad, and it's something I expect will change over the next while. I always try kaffe every time it comes out, but it hasn't yet been stable enough for me.
6-- You do need an experienced designer around if you are going to use Java. Unlike perl, where your goal is to hack out something working ASAP, in Java the point of the language is to allow you to do clean design. Well you won't get clean design without an experienced designer. Without a good designer you are probably better off with "write-once" perl-code that you throw out and rewrite whenever you need to fix it. While Java allows you to do really good design, I have seen some really nasty Java code. If you aren't going to use it right.. don't use it.
I also got to do some server side Java. It is fast and works great. Using JSP's is much better than ASP's because of the language -- Java is a full language while the ASP stuff is for scripting. VB is just full of inconsistant syntax. Furthermore, the Java Servlet API is very well done. There are a few things that ASPs make difficult to code and JSPs make almost trivial, like a file upload over HTTP (I don't why they were insistant about not using FTP).
Java has other nice & cool things, too, like the communications API. It works with serial and parallel ports. Like most Java API's it is very well written an easy to use.
For a poorly done Java API, look at the InfoBus. It sucks! I made a better one, but its more basic in function (part of the reason I think its better). Its on my web page, if you're interested. I call it the dataBus. All free with LGPL, of course.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
Somebody should add Enhydra to the list (I would, but I don't remember my login information for the JavaLobby). Enhydra is a very rockin' application server written in Java. It's open source too, which is always a plus.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
The company I work for recently programmed an SMS (cellular phone text-messages) server complete with a fancy web based user interface and a vCal integration that allows you to synchronize your cellular phone calendar with your desktop calendar automatically with SMS's as the carrier protocol. One team had worked on this for months and months using C/C++ and Perl. The deadline came closer and the app was still packed with bugs. So a hail-Mary manouver was performed only days before the deployment date and the whole thing was re-engineered in Java with parts of the vCal integration being Visual Basic. On the deployment date, we had a ready package which was actually FAR better than the C/C++ & Perl version. It had more features, was more easily integratable with other systems, featured a pluggable SMSC (short message system center) driver architecture, had a fancy self-repairing system which did self-monitoring of the whole thing. We had a home-brew RMI based distributed debugging service that allowed us to receive stack-traces and exceptions that occured at run time, from several servers at once and view them on the web. We had about a million other equally cool things, all put together in less than one week by a handful of programmers.
A few weeks later, there are still no major bugs reported and everything seems to be running perfectly smoothly.
What does this prove? Absolute nothing. However, it does raise some questions about how it's idiotic to just do everything with C/C++ because it's traditionally "the right thing to do". By using "traditional" programming languages, you will often be forced to spend so much time thinking about language issues, memory allocation & leaks, complex threading issues etc. that the application logic will suffer and become a secondary priority.
Pick the right tool for the right job. If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower. If you develop a complex server side application in C/C++ or Perl, you're nuts because there's NO WAY you will achieve the same quality in the amount of time you can achieve it in Java.
If you diss Java because of some stupid web applets programmed by some 13 year olds who know nothing about programming, it's just very sad because Java can do so much more. Unfortunately we see lots of "write once debug everywhere" statements by people who have little or no first hand experience with Java. The experience I have with Java tells me that while the Win32 platform still has the best virtual machines, Linux is gaining FAST, mostly thanks to IBM. Linux users: don't just use Kaffe because you've heard it's the right thing. Try running Java on a Win32 platform so you see what it CAN be like. I'm quite sure you will be amazed of the speed.
There are not many platform inconsistencies left, and if you know what you're doing, you can easily move a Java app from one platform to another without having to change any code or recompile anything. I've done this several times, even for very large and complex applications.
If you read the Java 2 Enterprise Edition Application Programming Model specification which now has an even more complex name which escapes me at the moment, you will see how SUN has worked hard in the EJB specification to define a great component architecture that is scalable, clusterable and avoids many common causes for platform specific bugs. Please read it!
A friend and I have just released a Java application. We use encryption to password protect web pages securely (plug: www.guardbot.com). The software comes in 2 parts, a Java applet decoder which performs the on-the-fly decryption of web pages, and a Java encoder which performs the encryption.
Without the Java's write once run anywhere capability, the decoder would have been impossible to deliver succesfully (without resorting to platform specific browser plugins, which would have put off a lot of users). Writing the encoder portion of the software let us deliver the software simultaneously to any Java supporting platform - without Java, we would probably have limited our software to Windows (at least initially).
Client side Java is not worthless, and I'd say that write once run anywhere is an extremely worthwhile goal - I'd very much like to see Sun deliver on this. As it stands, only Solaris and Windows have working Java 2 implementations, which is extremely disappointing.
The parts of Java that are slowest, from my experiance, are:
- GUI
- Object creation
- Poor programming
And yes, as computers get faster Java's speed will be less relavent. But that is true of anything. You probably don't care how long it takes for your email client to do anything, nor do you care how long your computer takes to deal with number crunching for your undergraduate college classes. That is because your computer can do these things so fast that you don't wait long, if at all. Thus, if those actions became twice as fast, you probably wouldn't care becasue you wouldn't notice.It still needs work, and I'm not sure that JFC will improve it much. Java software that doesn't use a GUI usually isn't very slow.
Making a new object takes time. A bit much time. Minimize usage of the new operatator to maximize performance.
Admit it -- this is the cause of most problems for almost anything.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
99% of all the posts are concerning corporate projects and every business I've ever seen is doing all their work in Java/Corba so you can satisfy yourself that Java/Corba is required if you want to be employed. At the same time in the non-business world, take a look at Freshmeat and you'll see almost everything done in C and Python. So we have the corporate world using Java almost strictly and the private world using C. Why is the corporate world so allied with Java and the private world so focused on C?
Java ain't proprietary; it's just still too rapidly evolving to be handed to "api by committee". We should be thanking sun, not condemning them. Once it is mature (as in Unix mature) then let the "api by committee" lord it over the place.
I've done a bit of Java programming myself, and I sure can't say that it strikes me as particularly fast in terms of development time. Perhaps for something relatively large it's faster than C. But I have never found an app which can be more quickly developed in Java than it could with say... Perl. Java is so strongly typed that it takes forever to parse data (which is a big deal for making web content draw from databases). Also, I've found that not only C, but even purely interpreted languages such as Sed or Perl yield better execution speeds as well.
Don't take my word for it, though. In Kernigan and Pike's classic, The Practice of Programming (C 1999), there's a pretty decent comparison. In the design and implimentation chapter they implement a Markov Chain algorithm as a decent test of perfomance/speed of development comparison between several languages. Here are the results:
PentiumII400MHz ----- Lines of source code
C ----- 0.30sec --------------- 150
Java --- 9.2 ------------------ 105
C++ --- 1.5 ------------------- 70
Awk ---2.1 ------------------- 20
Perl --- 1.0 ------------------- 18
Looking at the results above, Java doesn't look like much of a winner at anything. It comes in dead last in execution speed, and edges out only C (the performance winner) in development speed (based upon lines of code). Perl on the other hand, is a contender. As I see it, Java's only true strength is its propaganda machine.
I'm a gnu world man.
I'd love to have a go with this, though I don't know if Kaffe/Classpath/Apache currently does it. Have you had a play with Apache's mod_perl, though? That's the technology that drives Slashdot itself - integration of a Perl interpreter with the webserver, that allows damn fine perfomance and scads of flexibility.
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Xenu loves you!
I've worked extensively in C, C++, and Java. Given my choice I will take Java virtually every time.
The reason why comes down to pure productivity. On average (we're talking about over the course of years) I'm 300% more productive in Java than C++. In some cases (particularly networking code) that number is more like 1500%.
Just think of what things you can do if you can write your application three or more times as fast as the other guy. You have time to write it, rewrite it, and optimize it before he's even done the first time.
And that, my friends, translates into huge market advantage.
Now, lots of people say that the reason Java is more productive is because you don't spend your time tracking down memory issues. That's not the case for me, at least not in large part; it's really not that hard to write a clean program in C++, and memory leak issues still exist in Java (which sells a lot of Optimize-It licenses, lemme tell you). Rather, Java is a lot more stringent in enforcing interfaces than is C++, to say nothing of C.
Consider, for instance, that Java enforces handling or passing of exceptions. In C++ you can silently ignore them, usually resulting in bugs or reliability problems that don't show up until late in the development cycle (or, worse, in the field). In Java you have to explicitly deal with exceptions; you are forced to make a conscious decision as to what to do every time you use an interface that throws an exception. What that means In The Real World is much more robust code on the first effort -- if it fails, it usually fails gracefully.
There are actually some problems related to this. In beta test programs, for instance, it is a lot harder to get people to report problems because they usually manifest themselves as a feature that doesn't always seem to work rather than a complete application crash. On the other hand the application can notice the problem and report it nicely rather than just disappearing or dumping core. These kinds of problems I can live with.
There are other development advantages. Java is dynamically linked at runtime. This makes it slower to start up than a C or C++ application but it means that there is no link phase to deal with at each compile/edit/debug cycle. On a large C++ project I used to wait as much as fifteen minutes per link; with Java that time is always zero. That translates into many more cycles in the same timeframe, and that translates into product going out the door faster. (I must note that I used to work on a C/C++ debugger with an incremental linker and it had many of these same advantages. It was, however, rather expensive.)
So: we have a case here were random heap crashes can't happen, where interface enforcement is stringent enough that you get more reliable stuff together on the first try, and where you can run through a compile/edit/debug cycle a lot faster. There is a hell of a lot to like there.
There are some downsides though.
The compilers still suck -- at least all of the common ones. Oh, projects like Jikes are yielding compilers that build code fast, but none of them build good code. They don't even do simple peephole optimizations, to say nothing of what you get in your typical C++ compiler. It's like going back and looking at code produced by 70s C compilers. Apparently the idea is that the JIT system takes care of that -- but JIT systems are severely limited in how much time they can spend compiling the code, plus they don't have anywhere near as much semantic information. The end result is worse code. This was true of C++ for quite some time too, of course, and is expected to get better, but for the moment you get to optimize a lot of things by hand.
JVM stability has been something of an issue. Big programs that push the environment hard (like, say, a web application that's handling tens of millions of hits per day, which is what I do with Java) tend to find the dirty corners that don't show up in your typical "hello world" applet. Things like limitations on the number of classes and methods you can have in your application (low tens of thousands prior to JDK 1.2), heap lock contention overhead as the thread count scales beyond a hundred or so, and other things have pushed us towards designs that are less convenient to build (although arguably much more scalable and fault tolerant).
Some people speak of JDBC being really nice. It's a good idea, but practically speaking very few of the JDBC drivers are particularly reliable, cross-compatibility leaves a lot to be desired, and performance is often not so hot. You have to spend more time on optimization. Luckily you have more time to spend on optimization.
So Java has its problems, but in my experience everything has its problems. Java's problems can be worked around with architecture and optimization and productivity improvements are so good that you have the time to do it. The end result is often a better product out the door faster.
Now, for all you guys who say that Java just isn't fast enough, several of the largest sites on the web run Java-based applications (you almost certainly have used some of them without even knowing it). And they do it on a lot less hardware, and less expensive hardware, than any of the competition manages with C/C++. This is in direct contract to the popular opinion that Java is slow.
There's nothing stopping someone from writing the same kind of thing in C/C++ other than time. We've had the time to write, optimize, rewrite, and optimize again several times over in the time span it has taken most of the competition to just make their product stable. Unsurprisingly this results in a faster and more stable product even when we've had to work around problems that the other guy wouldn't have had to deal with.
Java isn't for everything. You'd be insane to write drivers or operating systems in it, and runtime environments are really way too big for most embedded applications today. But when it works it's great, and it is working on a whole lot of servers out there on the 'net. You don't hear about them because nobody talks about the stuff that works, only the stuff that doesn't (like, say, eBay).
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
You're uninformed. Get used to it.
/. users must be told EVERYTHING DOESN'T HAVE TO BE OPEN SOURCE. Jesus, 1999 appears to be the year of Open Source Fascists.
Support for Java is still growing. While it may be entertaining to spout crap like this, it's really not useful or constructive.
Once again,
C, while extremely fast, is a bear to code threads
Eh? While I would agree that Java makes threads really simple, I wouldn't say that threads are necessarily that hard to deal with in C, at least not POSIX threads. Now if you are talking Win32, then you are right, those are a bear. The real hassle with C is that you have to code threaded code totally differently on *nix and Win32, while in Java you can just move byte code for a threaded app between those two without even recompiling and it will work (at least I have been able to do that).
and tedious for networking.
If you write directly to the Berkeley Sockets interface, that may be true, however just about everyone I know quickly develops (or buys/borrows) their own set of libraries and/or C++ wrapper classes which greatly simplify network programming. Again, the hassle is usually if you want to write a portable networking app, Win32 has unfortunately greatly diverged from the standard sockets interface, so you are back to lots of ugly ifdefs or some other way to handle the differences while with Java you can usually just move the byte code across and it will work.
WTF are you talking about?
Yes, Andover acquired Slashdot, but where have you seen them barring links exiting the site? THAT'S WHAT THE WHOLE FREAKING SITE **IS**. Have the story links gone away? Have the Slashboxes gone away?
Besides, what does Andover care whether you use the Slash system or not? As for Slash being closed-source, I think that's a it unfair. CmdrTaco is lazy:
Someday I'll post a new version, but honestly its a lower priority to me than it ought to be.
I'm to busy ironing out kinks and adding features to take a couple days and create a distributable tar ball. It'll happen, but
not tomorrow. I'm already working pretty much every waking second of the day.
But SlashDot is neither completely closed source nor open source. ANd I think that's because it's tough running a site like this and running a collaborative open source project all at once.
I'm just sick and tired of people slamming companies who make money.
If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower.
;-)) and there is constant flickering when pages are rendered. If they could remove that... The pages I visit most often look good.
Well, there is HotJava, a web browser developed by Sun completely in Java (1.1). Get it here.
However, I never got it to run as non-admin under NT (but I don't really care
"Does anybody know of a way to use the Swing widgets with python?"
;) www.jpython.org
:b.
Yeah, use JPython
If you want to use them with scheme, use Kawa (www.gnu.org/software/kawa)
If you want yo use them with tcl, use Jacl (I dont remember the url).
:b
I'm still waiting for JPerl, or sumthing like that
---> Did you know Linux stands for Linux Is Not UniX ?
Always worked pretty well for me under Solaris. I especially liked the little colored "threads" that showed the multiple connections: if a data connection was still open, I would wait, but once enough of the page was loaded that all the remaining connections were the "image" color, then I could safely click "Stop". No bigass images sucking down my bandwidth, and I know that all the HTML/Java/Javascript/etc has arrived.
I gave it up because it can't do forms and pop-up boxes worth CRAP -- even when communicating with Sun's own site to download security reports! As a Sun sysadmin, I
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Pick the right tool for the right job.
I agree completely! I beat my co-developers over the head with this saying all the time. But...
If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower. If you develop a complex server side application in C/C++ or Perl, you're nuts because there's NO WAY you will achieve the same quality in the amount of time you can achieve it in Java.
This is kind of funny...
My approach is to use, say, C++ as the server-side language, because of the richer feature space and the quality of code. I use Java as the client-side GUI because it's trivial to build GUIs in Java, and because the code speed is not as important -- most of the time the human is still the slowest thing in the loop.
I should add, however, that I don't use Java to write web applets (it's not that I use other languages for that, it's that I don't write web applets at all). I use Java to generate a complete GUI application, and then use an ahead-of-time compiler to create optimized binaries for the platforms that I know are going to use it. (See, for example, Per Bothner's paper on treating Java as just another language.)
This just goes to show how programmers can have exactly opposing views, and both be right. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's very helpful, not just for various servers yoiu might run into but it also means you can use whatever box you like to develop on.
What it also lets you do is switch out servers with Linux servers later on if you want to - Java could be great aid to migrating more servers to Linux (or BSD).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I -love- JSP/Servletes. I have been able to increase my development time significantly and the performance is not (in my perception) lower than Perl or PHP.
So Java Servlets are responsible for the increase in your development time?
cpeterso
Now, two days later, I'm looking for something entirely different and my search leads me to a glossary page. That wasn't what I was looking for so I hit back, but for an instant just before the page was erased, I scrolled down and saw it in the corner of my eye:
WDDX
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.