On the eve of Java One 2007, I for one have decided to move on from Java. I suspect I am somewhat late to the party – there has been a growing trend for some time of developers seeking greener pastures.
I’ve been working with all the major dynamic languages (Python, PHP, Ruby and JavaScript) the past couple of years (I also developed a major Java based system during this time) and have grown to love the huge gains in productivity they offer. In a world that thrives on speed, it is easy to see why this gain in productivity will be immensely valued in the coming years.
While not all of the dynamic language environments are as mature as Java (PHP and Python are definitely very close) in terms of execution speed and availability of tools/libraries, there is a lot of attention being paid to them at this time and I am confident they will mature quickly.
After C, I for one cannot think of a language that has had more impact than Java. In addition to fueling the growth of transactional enterprise web applications, I believe that Java’s portability has really helped fuel the Linux revolution. But all good things must come to an end sooner or later and I believe that we are at that point for Java …
Hi Shankar, great to see you have a blog!
I’m still grateful you encouraged us to abandon JSF in favor of pure Ajax. It was controversial at the time to abandon a Java-based programming model for a Javascript-based programming model, but it’s been fantastic.
Hey Bill,
Great to hear from you – thanks for the kind words.
What is quite amazing is that lately I’ve been seeing a lot of JSF frameworks claiming to do AJAX – unless I’m missing something here, it seems like the worst possible way to implement AJAX …
> What is quite amazing is that lately I’ve been seeing a lot of JSF frameworks
> claiming to do AJAX – unless I’m missing something here, it seems like the
> worst possible way to implement AJAX …
I think there are a class of programmers who are extremely comfortable with Java and will do whatever they can to avoid leaving their comfort zone. JSF is sort of the apogee of the ‘stateful server-based web UI’ which I think is completely broken (see this article I wrote: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/wa-ajaxarch/).
Trying to weld Ajax on top of JSF IMO is just another example of this class of developers refusing to adapt to other programming languages and styles.
Great point – see my post on this very topic a couple of weeks back.