Java State of the Union: One Year Under Oracle

In this post, I look at three recent and interesting posts related to the state of Java today.


Java State of Union

In his first Java Observer/Observable post (Change of State), Athen O'Shea makes some observations regarding "Oracle's influence on Java so far" and refers to the upcoming (February 15) OTN Techcast (Java and Oracle, One Year Later) as Oracle's "first State of the Union" for Java.

In his post, Athen states that he'd like JavaWorld readers and contributors to comment on their thoughts regarding "Oracle's influence on Java so far." Athen adds that he is not looking so much for obvious comments about obvious Oracle impacts on Java or wild attempts at fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). Rather, Athen is "more interested in subtleties and contradictions" and provides three examples:

1. Oracle alliances with powerful competitor organizations (Oracle, Apple) in OpenJDK and Oracle's JCP Executive Committee nomination of the Brazilian Java Users Group SouJava (represented by Bruno Souza)
2. "Oracle's well documented unilateral stubbornness in the JCP" contrasted with Doug Lea "being a co-signer on the initial draft OpenJDK governance bylaws"
3. Multiple facets of the potential of a Java fork.

Athen has identified some interesting subtleties and contradictions. Other things I look forward to finding out is if Oracle is able to retrofit JavaFX to support standard Java APIs and to make it a popular, well-used rich interface technology. I have long believed that one of JavaFX's biggest hurdles was not really being Java in terms of language. However, even with a standard Java API, there will be concerns about JavaFX not being a standard and being proprietary.

The future of NetBeans under Oracle continues to interest me. The recent announcement of NetBeans dropping support for Ruby is obviously disappointing to Ruby developers, but may be an advantage for Java developers if more resources are applied to the Java portions and functionality of the IDE. I'd like to see continued improvements for Groovy and other alternative JVM languages. For example, I'd like to have a Groovy project without it being considered a Grails project. I also look forward to experimenting with Java 7 features in NetBeans 7. I believe that dropping of Ruby support from NetBeans is an overall positive development for most Java developers in the sense that it implies Oracle's true commitment to the Java side of the IDE. For those developers writing Java and Ruby code, it is not as positive.


A Year Later: Has Oracle Ruined or Saved Sun?

In the article A year later: Has Oracle ruined or saved Sun?, Paul Krill looks at the effect of Oracle's purchase of Sun on a wide set of Sun technologies including Java. He talks about NetBeans dropping support for Ruby (a rough week for Ruby), the confrontational relationship between Oracle and Apache (which is really a continuation of the Sun/Apache relationship), the Hudson/Jenkins developments, and the Google lawsuit over Android.


Java Ain't Dead - It's Still #1

Yakov Fain's recent post Forrester, Java ain’t dead – it’s still #1! takes issue with yet another report of Java's demise. Although just as even a broken clock is correct twice a day, the "Java is dead" posters will eventually be correct, just numerous years off on the timing of that event. I have commented on the ridiculousness of such posts previously, but I especially liked the approach Fain took in this post. Fain states (and I have often observed this to be the case): "Unfortunately, people who state that Java’s dead are not the people who use the latest Java technologies day in and day out." Fain also observes that "in this presentation the author made a number of statements that show that his perception of Java platform is based on the status of the platform several years ago." This is understandable: not everyone has the good fortunate to be able to use the latest version of Java EE. However, it also means that those people are less qualified to talk about the current state of the same technology.

I have seen this before in conjunction with Java. In the beginning, Java was slow. Unfortunately, even after years of significant investment by JVM suppliers in making their JVM implementations very efficient, I still ran into intelligent, well-meaning individuals who simply were basing statements on out-of-date personal experiences or opinions heard/read from others that were out of date. For some of these individuals, it took a while for them to come to grips with the idea that things had changed. I always learn best when I do something myself or try it out myself. Reading gets me so far, but then I need to work directly with it to really start to understand. I think many people are this way. Additionally, none of us can read and use every available alternative out there and so must trust what we read and hear from others to a certain degree. The software development blogosphere has never been truly representative of reality, but it is easy to forget that.

"Java is dead" posts are almost as old as Java itself. For a dead language, Java seems to continue to do pretty well. If languages had emotions or feelings, I bet many of the "still living" languages would love to be as dead.

By the way, the post Explained: Java is A Dead-End for Enterprise Application Development, Mike Gualtieri provides an "expansion of my arguments" from the original post Java Is A Dead-End For Enterprise App Development. From the comments, it sounds like Gualtieri's headline may be overly dramatic and more sensationalist than what the real content seems to be: use the right tool for the job. I would have liked to see the original slides themselves, but the "free registration" to download the slides requires a "business email address" (proving once again that nothing is really "free"). I don't usually give out that type of information because I have rarely found such resources to be any better or more informative or more correct than what's publicly available without strings attached.


Conclusion

What is the state of Java? In some ways it's a mess, but in some ways there seems to be lots of potential. It definitely continues to have a future. In The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010, Andrew Binstock states: "Java, C, C++, PHP, C#, and Python are languages that are widely used and will have plenty of support in the years to come." I agree with him about this set of languages (I have worked all except for PHP, but PHP's prevalence is obvious) and Java definitely fits into the category. Like numerous others, I have stated before that the alternative JVM languages are particular exciting, but Java SE and Java EE continue to be the work horses of the platform.