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Hacks
Hacks
Posted Oct 21, 2005 3:41 UTC (Fri) by mdaniel (guest, #33232)In reply to: Hacks by Richard_J_Neill
Parent article: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)
As far as I can understand, the "big deal" about Java is platform independence. Except that is isn't really. And if you have an open-source application, who cares about compatibility of *binaries*.
The "big deal" about Java's "platform independence" is the common "processor" and libraries against which you code. You think OpenSource cured the notion of compatibility? Tell that to the autotools folks, who have built an empire stringing m4 macros and shell together to determine what kind of strcat you have on your flavor of *nix.
The funny thing is that I'm not a Java zealot; I agree with the ancestor's comment that Java is bloated and exceeeeeeeedingly verbose. That does not, however, compromise that Java provides a common vocabulary (I mean that in terms of the language and especially the libraries) for some of the most powerful and maintainable server-side software I've ever encountered.
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Hacks
Posted Oct 21, 2005 8:05 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
Java was intended to be a language for developing client-side code. Perhaps part of the mis-fit we see is because its main occupation today is converse to the one for which it was designed.Bruce
Hacks
Posted Oct 21, 2005 15:12 UTC (Fri) by mdaniel (guest, #33232) [Link]
Java was intended to be a language for developing client-side code. Perhaps part of the mis-fit we see is because its main occupation today is converse to the one for which it was designed.
With all due respect, something like Jini is what Java was intended to do: network-transparent, device-independent, "roaming" code [think of your fridge telling your PDA that you're out of bread]. The fact that people used it for dancing monkeys when it first came out doesn't make James Gosling any happier than it makes you or I.
And I just said it's verbose, not that it's poor at doing its job. It enables a lot of strong software engineering practices very well. I use this example with my cow-orkers a lot: you have ten seconds to tell me what file contains the class com.foo.CoolClass. Where would you look? How would you solve the same problem in C++?