Calvin Austin's Blog

January 2006 Archives

If Java was a car

Kirk Pepperdine, guru of Java performance, recently praised Sun and the Java team for their open bug database and questioned the labelling of enhancements as 'bugs'. At the same time, someone at Sun made a tough decision to slip JDK 6.0. Personally I thought the schedule was never going to fit, it has been a tough time for engineers at Sun and google is a tempting new home for many, so I applaud the move, people remember a bad product for far longer than they remember a delay.

However, given Kirks point and Rays blog together, I think as developers we have get a good deal from Java when I compare it to the car I bought last year.

If Java was a car:

1. You would have to pay to see bug reports (car technical service bulletins)
2. Every 3 to 6 months you would have to stop using it and find something else to use for a day (car service)
3. Unless you were part of a focus group selected you couldn't give product feature requests or track them using a number
4. You could only use a copy for your state, you would have to pay for a different state or country (ok california have fairly tough car laws)
5. Tuning the JVM voids your warranty and insurance

Cars have other advantages of course but it does underline that developers and Java developers do get a certain freedom to influence a product and gain important information for free.

Java wins programming language of the year

Java is the programming language of the year according to the Tiobe index http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm.

Although the index is purely an quantitative web based count of activity , it does also mean it is free from any editorial or company bias. The award is quite unusual as it measures the percentage growth. So that means even if you are bottom of the class you have a chance to win. If you are already at #1, as Java was, it is really hard to achieve. For example C# was close in the running as it grew 1.35% to a measured 3.55% (Java was top with 22.25%) and grew 4.77%

Combined with the new app servers like Geronimo as I blogged previously , this measure of activity could grow even higher.

Go Geronimo Go!

Geronimo 1.0 was released last week. Apache Geronimo is a new, open source, J2EE 1.4 certified application server. It is built from many established open source projects, like OpenEJB, Tomcat and the Derby database so it already has some pedigree.

The more I think about it, Java developers are in a great position. There is a great choice of open source J2EE app servers, Geronimo, Jonas, JBoss, Glassfish or you get free access to many commercial servers.

If you are interested in trying out Geronimo with the addition of mysql and postgresql in a sandboxed environment that won't overwrite your existing app, I've written up some notes to get started with our preview of Geronimo 1.0. The download and instructions are available here

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