On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:31, Casper Bang <[email protected]> wrote: > Somehow Sun lost their vision for Java a long time ago and hid behind > the compatibility wall.
I think, the vision was quite clear right at the beginning and my opinion is that this vision still applies. My personal background as a developer is that until 2005 our customers had nearly 100% Windows. Now not only that nearlly all customers have a Linux firewall, they usually have additional Linux-Servers. Until about 2005 my Linux-on-the-desktop-attempts came along with a lot of basic problems like graphic card not recognized etc. Now I run Linux on my desktop even at work where most of the things ran out-of-the-box. I think, that platform independence was never so interesting and important as today! - Have a look at http://www.focus.com/fyi/information-technology/50-places-linux-running-you-might-not-expect/ - and this is just a part of the story. Last year I heard of customers using Open BSD the first time. Other customer uses Solaris. On the desktop there is Mac getting more and more market share - at least that is my experience with some friends having bought a Mac in the last one or two years (I could not have imagined that a few years ago). There isn't either just Windows, Mac and Linux if we look a little into detail. We have a huge amount of operating systems nowadays - look at http://distrowatch.com/ . Quite every customer I face nowadays as a multi-OS-environment. And it is an important freedom for the customer to have the app running where he wants not being limited by specific OS requirement. And Linux on the desktop is also becoming more important - no, there won't be "THE year of Linux on the desktop" - it will be a slight transition that will last many years. And from my personal view before 2005 it was quite unrealistic for Linux on the desktop for the masses. But I can see each year really great improvements. So bringing it to the point: Java had a vision that only NOWADAYS begins to get REALLY important! > Since Microsoft was forced to start from > scratch, they've been able to move rapidly and deliver quite a bit of > productive innovation into the mainstream with Hejlsberg, Lippert, > Torgerson and now Huginen, Meijer and Gafter at the helm. I was a Windows-only-Developer until approx. End of 2008 and I tried and compared Java with .NET several times. My .NET experience was bad, really bad (ok, I started with .NET 1.0 and was so disappointed that I left it for another year until retrying), but even my last experiences (about a year ago) can only be described with the word "annoyance". The company I am working for does a lot of .NET development and this is needed because this is the _current_ "state of the art" development base for Windows and the vast majority of our customers is (still) using Windows on the desktop and have Windows servers and want some Windows-Applications to be tightly integrated that only have programming interfaces for Windows. - Problems with .NET start with the setup. Do you remember times under MS-DOS (if you had experience with that), when copying a few files was all the "installation" work needed to get the application onto a machine? - People forgot that it could be so simple but they want this back only if it is to not touch too much on that running Windows workstation/server. Yesterday I got a call of a customer who destroyed his server by installing MS SQL Server Express 2005 and 2008 in parallel - boom! - I dare, he would (at least from now) prefer copying a single Jar or War for an app to get it up and running! > The open source implementations are not far behind, but enough to be dismissed > on that ground alone - in spite of still being leaps and bounds ahead > of Java. Ahead of Java? - Can't see that. BTW: Just dropping checked exceptions was a bad decision IMHO (just to give an example). Not talking of all the available stuff around it. Not a single thing where you don't have at least - at least - two choices in Java. > For the first time I think, we've heard some similar concerns from > Joshua Bloch a few days ago - not unlike what Neal Gafter expressed > shortly before joining Microsoft: > http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/google-exec-worries-over-rudderless-java-586 >From that what Bloch said there reminds me to Debian. Just because the release schedules are longer does not mean that it is going to die. Other people might consider this as there is the intention of having a stable and well considered system. I am happy, that Java is not implementing every new feature-request just because it is currently modern. I looked also at newer languages but although they have benefits I am quite sure that the long-term-replacement for Java has yet to come. I have not the 10-years of Java-history like most Java-Developers I know. Let's say I am a "recent convert". I have well evaluated the alternatives and I am convinced that still from current point of view: JAVA RULES! I LOVE IT - for server and desktop development! > I have my doubts about Oracle, like many large enterprises they > usually see massively complicated $OA stacks with vendor lock-in, > before seeing anything else. But I am ready to be surprised. :) There is no doubt that the Java leadership (and Java "marketing") affects decisions for some companies whether to develop some new application in Java or something else. -- Martin Wildam -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
