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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."
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...
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.
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.