Hacks

Hacks

Posted Oct 21, 2005 15:12 UTC (Fri) by mdaniel (guest, #33232)
In reply to: Hacks by BrucePerens
Parent article: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

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++?

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