What a great quote! I'm a big Java fan, but your statement is sadly true about most Java applications developed today.
It is not that Java isn't a terrific language, but all modern OO languages suffer the same problem: they provide more ways for poor programmers to make a mess. Most companies are only interested in getting the lowest hourly programming labor possible and don't employ even the most basic software quality controls. Compare this to the 50 years of COBOL development.... Its *not* that great, reusable, and maintainable code can't be written in Java. One only has to look at some of the many open source Java tools and frameworks to see some great engineering, great programming practices, and nice maintainable code. A large percentage of this code runs fine on z/OS, without rebuilding the jars. John's example refers to his use of Apache Derby : it is a complete relational database written in 100% Java. It supports JDBC connections, and you can even use IBM's JDBC client drivers with it. Sure, its not going to complete with DB2 or Oracle in terms of performance or scalability, but it runs quite well as a little embedded application database. It is based on the old "Cloudscape" product, which IBM bought and for a long time used it as the configuration database for WAS if you didn't have DB2. (WAS now uses XML configuration files rather than a relational database, which probably makes more sense for configuration documents anyway). IBM donated Cloudscape to the Apache Foundation and it is an actively maintained and enhanced product. But there are scores of examples of well engineered and maintainable Java applications. Consider the Eclipse IDE framework - a truly amazing piece of work that has evolved over the last decade to dominate the IDE space. On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Howard Brazee <[email protected]>wrote: > On 24 Jun 2009 11:01:29 -0700, [email protected] (Edward > Jaffe) wrote: > > >But, then you would not know the "joys" of using the "write once; debug > >everywhere" language! ;-) > > Modern languages are like TVs. We don't maintain their code, we > replace it. > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
