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 
November 14th, 2005 at 11:54 am
Bruce ‘FUD’ Tate - I do anything to sell my writings.
November 14th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
I doubt whether or not AppFuse is not for the faint of the heart like you’re saying.
I train a lot of people on lightweight development using Spring, Hibernate, EasyMock and more tools like that, and I consistently get feedback from all levels (both juniors as well as seniors). This often includes the lightweight approach along with a decent explanation of what Java (and especially J2EE) really simplifies things a lot. Back in the old days, we’ve done things using certain techniques that were heavily overused, resulting in complex systems. Now with the JPA (Java Persistence API) coming and the rise of other techniques that simplify application development we’re back on the right track I believe.
I do see the value of dynamic languages and where they will be simplifying application development in the (I believe not so near) future and the JVM will certainly help here. I do however also believe that a thorough understanding of how things work (especially the more enterprise-level techniques and APIs) along with a simplified (yet equally if not more powerful) programming model is really not that bad at all…
regards,
Alef
November 15th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
Agree, it is a good thing to see how the JDO spec and the EJB3 spec are merging into one persistence API but somehow API’s produced by JSR-XXX always tend to have those typical hairy (or should I say scary) constructions which do not really try to get the simple minded on board. Example:
EntityManagerFactory factory = ….. // probably EntityManagerFactoryFactory.getInstance();
EntityManager manager = factory.createEntityManager(PersistenceContextType.TRANSACTION)
manager.persist(myObject)
How about
myObject.persist() ?????
Of course, Spring is the answer for managing managers, factories and uberfactories
November 20th, 2005 at 12:23 pm
Well,
I thought i should add my thoughts on this subject too
Personally having talked to Bruce extensively over the week he was in the Netherlands i tend to agree with him and the stance he takes in his book beyond JAVA. Now i dont think Bruce is saying things like ruby on rails will be the replacement of end all java and neither do I. However the amount of frameworks and tools someone new to JAVA has to learn to just get a simple web based application running on top of a database is staggering and productivity is lacking. Now, having had some more exposure to rails trough the book agile webdevelopment with rails, I have to agree with Bruce that there is a big void in JAVA and its frameworks and that this nice might be filled by ruby on rails. At the very least the existence of rails should be a wake up call to all of us in the JAVA community who take the complexity we deal with in our day to day work for granted.
Leo de Blaauw
LogicaCMG
Groningen