Bruce Tate, successful author of several books including the well known Better, Faster, Lighter Java, held a presentation during the Guru4Pro meetings in the Netherlands. The Guru4Pro meetings are organized to facilitate the exchange of idea’s and information between profesionals. This all in an informal atmosphere. Approximately 120 people attented the presentation and evaluation showed that all visitors were extremely satisfied. After the last presentation slide a lively discussion followed about the predictions that Bruce made.
- The JCP becomes increasingly fragmented
- Java slowly loses its leadership position
- The JVM becomes more important to dynamic languages
- We see a backlash against
- Annotations
- AOP
- The backlash may or may not be warranted
You may agree or disagree with the predictions but they are surely food for thought.
Personally I totally agree with the predictions that “Java is going to lose its leadership position” and that the “JVM is becoming more and more important to dynamic languages“.
As coach of several junior programmers I often hear them complaining about:
- things just being to complex
- the total fragmentation of Java
A succesfull implementation of an entry level Java program such as a simple database driven website can already be damn complex. Using technologies like PHP, Ruby etc who enable me to implement the same functionality in a shorter timeperiod I start wondering why this cannot be done by using Java. Offcourse there are quickstarters like Appfuse etc. but again this is all not for the faint of hart.
Note that the presentation of Bruce is attached to this post 
