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Essential Java resources (developerWorks)
IBM developerWorks presents
a list of Java resources. "Since its introduction to the
programming community as a whole in 1995, the Java platform has evolved far
beyond the "applets everywhere" vision that early Java pundits and
evangelists imagined a Java world to be like. Instead, the Java world rose
up to Swing, coalesced around servlets, rode that into J2EE, stumbled on
EJB, sidestepped over to Spring and Hibernate, added generics and became
more dynamic, then functionalized, and continues to grow in all sorts of
interesting directions even as I write this."
(Log in to post comments)
Essential Java resources (developerWorks) Posted Jan 28, 2009 17:52 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Nope. Java isn't growing in interesting directions. Instead it's stagnating on all directions.
For example, closures were _DROPPED_ from Java7 draft. Generics added in Java5 are a crude hack, as they rely on type erasure. There are no real improvements in emerging areas like transactional memory or lightweight threads. SWING as UI is _still_ not adequate enough (JavaFX is nice, but ultimately not very compelling).
Now C# leads in 'mainstream' language development. It has _REAL_ generics, closures, lambdas, LINQ (a _very_ interesting development) and is generally moving towards bringing functional programming into mainstream.
growing or stagnating Posted Jan 29, 2009 0:40 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
Java the language may be stagnating (I don't know, I'm not a Java
programmer), but Java the platform (JVM and associated tools and middleware) is definitely growing. Among other things, more and more people are running dynamic languages on the JVM, and finding that they run faster or more parallelizably than their compiled-to-native-hardware counterparts (if any exist).
JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, and others are where the action is now. Sometimes
growing or stagnating Posted Jan 29, 2009 14:12 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Unfortunately, other technologies do not gain significant traction on Java Platform.
Besides, JVM is not very good for a lot of stuff like lightweight Erlang-style threads. There's no tail-call optimization, so JVM is not very friendly for functional languages, etc.
Essential Java resources (developerWorks) Posted Jan 29, 2009 4:49 UTC (Thu) by Holmes1869 (guest, #42043) [Link]
I tend to agree with the sibling poster. Java as a platform seems to be doing ok. I honestly couldn't care if Java ever adds another language feature.
I've used Java for a number of years, but only in the past 2 years have I discovered brilliant stacks of software such as Struts2/Spring/Hibernate/Tomcat. The whole world of the big J2EE server used with EJBs and other monstrosities is absolutely gross and I hope to never return there.
As long as some very good frameworks continue to be created and improved within the Java world, I will continue to be a zombie Java follower.
Does Sun have its Java act together yet? Posted Jan 29, 2009 1:26 UTC (Thu) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211) [Link] For the longest time, Sun was really not helping Java be a "community" so much as be a "market under Sun's control". They did a lot to exclude open source leadership participation (followers were fine, a couple years after specs became usable). Their "Java Community Process" was a big wedge there, at least for the first few years, since the agreements you had to sign basically made you forswear most discussions except behind Sun's closed doors and in support of their big-money friends. I understand that GCJ is continuing to improve, but think that like so much Java technology it may have lost a lot of its shine. ARM's Java acceleration (e.g. on the widely used arm926ej-s cores) is still not publicly documented, at Sun's insistence (or so I'm told), so I've never even seen that hardware support used on any of the dozens of embedded ARM platforms I've used. And recall that embedded systems have long been a key target for the Java market... Just curious here. I left Java a number of years ago. If I did much userspace programming I might consider picking it up again, but the taste left in my mouth makes me suspect I won't.
Does Sun have its Java act together yet? Posted Jan 29, 2009 13:23 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] ARM's Java acceleration (e.g. on the widely used arm926ej-s cores) is still not publicly documented, at Sun's insistence (or so I'm told) Jazelle is ARM's technology, Sun only has a license to it, AFAIK.
Does Sun have its Java act together yet? Posted Jan 29, 2009 18:16 UTC (Thu) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211) [Link] Sun only has a license to it, AFAIK The companies share IP rights to it, according to ARM Ltd when I've asked. And ARM Ltd says it's Sun's insistence which keeps the specs closed.
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