Apache's role in all of this [LWN.net]

Apache's role in all of this

Posted Aug 22, 2012 10:13 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Three answers in one by Cyberax
Parent article: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

So, both WebStart and Python require the user to download it before using it. Unsurprisingly. From there Python is more geared to professional users, for which I am grateful (since amateurs are not going to use WebStart or pip anyway).

Maven is not in Java, it is an outside package. Which brings us to another one of Java's treats: the big ecosystem of Apache software. But wait, why is such a big corpus of code necessary at all? To provide for Java deficiencies, which means the 50MB+ JRE monstrosity is not even enough to have a decent set of collections. Each useful third-party package you find out there is likely to depend on a few Apache libraries, meaning that you will be soon managing tens of .jar files. To bring this into perspective, there are 39 Apache Commons projects, which are supposed to provide foundation libraries. Which is why Maven is needed. Whew!

Apache code is maintained by the ASF foundation which is at odds with Oracle. I guess that the worst problem here is that Java is controlled by Oracle, a hostile corporation. Compare with Python, Perl, C or even JavaScript (which seems to be in the hands of a handful of browser vendors, but at least they cooperate).

(Log in to post comments)

Apache's role in all of this

Posted Aug 22, 2012 15:38 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>So, both WebStart and Python require the user to download it before using it. Unsurprisingly. From there Python is more geared to professional users, for which I am grateful (since amateurs are not going to use WebStart or pip anyway).

Actually, it is possible to install Java using browsers' automatic plugin detection.

>To provide for Java deficiencies, which means the 50MB+ JRE monstrosity is not even enough to have a decent set of collections.

Please, stop repeating nonsense. Commons-collections is a dead project, it hadn't been necessary for a loooooooong time. Sun JVM in fact has one of the best collection libraries, including parallel and non-blocking collections which you'd be hard-pressed to find in other languages.

You also might actually browse the list of apache-commons libraries. About a half of them are either thin wrappers over several other libraries and/or long-dead projects.

Apache's role in all of this

Posted Aug 22, 2012 16:12 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I was not repeating anything, it is just my own recollection. If the situation has improved nowadays, good for them!