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Shut Us Down
Posted by invalidname on August 13, 2007 at 07:55 AM | Comments (6)
Are there too many Java frameworks?
There's a conservative streak running through Java advocacy lately. Not politically conservative, but in the dictionary definition of "holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation". There seem to be a lot of developers in our community resistant to some of the proposals for changes in the Java 7 time-frame. This is something of a trend that followed the major changes of Java 5 (generics, annotations, enumerated types), though what initially appeared to be a reflexive "buyer's remorse" over generics seems to be more than that -- for every blogger saying generics should be torn out of the language, you can find another saying that Java needs to go further and have fully reified generics.
Still, the conservative voices are making themselves heard. Check out the current poll results. Asked "Which proposed language change would you most like to see in Java 7," the voters' current preference is "I don't want any language changes," ahead of all eight specific proposals. Of course, this could change by the time the poll closes on Friday. More importantly, there's a rollicking discussion on the poll results page. Some posts ask for language changes other than the options listed in the poll, while others say "leave well enough alone", such as jwenting, who writes:
For Java 7, lets just get rid of the marketing team that drives the language development and take the chance to actually get rid of a lot of garbage. Things like StringTokenizer, Vector, and everything deprecated.
And get rid of all the idiots proposing to add everything and the kitchen sink to the language "because Ruby has it" (or insert someone's favourite language) which is all the reason anyone's ever really come up with for such idiocies as closures, operator overloading, properties, multiple inheritance, embedded SOAP stacks and database servers, and just about everything else added since 1.4
There's a similar comment highlighted in today's Forums, in the Big Question forum (originally set up to discuss the possible open-sourcing of Java, and presumably superseded by The Big Answer). In a discussion of "What Developers Want", rjilani asks
Please stop promoting new frameworks and concentrate on Java stack and tool.
"I once learned Java not to "write once and run every where" but to "learn once and apply every where"; that spirit of Java has been gone long long time ago. The whole community has been robbed by shallow developers and shallow experts who doesn't know any thing better but to offer and promote a new framework every day. The sad part is that the whole community has no choice but to learn some one else stupid framework just because of the marketing hype and fear of not being left out from the herd. The life of most framework span is even shorter than the lifecycle of a decent project; and it give us nothing but yet another fail project with a bad name of Java being too complex."
Elsewhere in the forums, davjoh is trying to figure out
Phone support for CDC/AGUI.
"I've been looking at developing with the Netbeans Mobility pack for CDC, and it seems to only support AGUI. My current target devices are iPAQs running Jbed CDC/PP (which I currently have running J9 with stuff written on CLDC/MIDP). I know there are SDKs that you can integrate into Netbeans for Sony Ericsson CDC phones and Nokia Series 80, but is there not a generic(ish) one like the AGUI kit but for PP? Also, I've read that the only real devices that support AGUI are SavaJe-based (JavaFX Mobile now??) phones. Is this really the case? Because if so, it kind of limits the target audience. Does anyone know what, if any, devices support AGUI?"
Finally, there's the question
which load balancers (web servers) can be used with Glassfish?
"Along with sun java web server which has a plugin for glassfish, which other load balancers (hardware or web servers) can be used as load balancer? Can you please elaborate and give me some links to some resources about this?"
In Java Today,
GlassFish's Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart has heard requests from JSP developers and is now PreAnnouncing new GlassFish Subproject for JSP. "Separate projects encourate reuse and contributions but are more work and can create confusion so we wait before creating them. We have received several requests for a JSP project so we are going to create one. Please let me know (or just post here) if you are interested in this project."
Center Key Sofware has posted a tutorial on How to Create a Mac OS X Installer for a Java Application. "With some simple steps you can turn your Java Swing program into a proper Mac application with a native installer. The instructions below step you through the process from scratch with a sample program called "It's Showtime!", which simply displays the current time. Once you have successfully completed the tutorial with the sample Java program, modify the steps to work for your Java program."
The latest edition, issue 133, of the JavaTools Community newsletter is available, with tool news from around the web, new projects in the community and a graduation from the incubator (GAJET), and a Tool Tip on integrating Subversion with your Ant scripts.
In today's Weblogs,
Greg Murray explains the process of
Re-Namespacing Dojo.
"JavaScript in the enterprise tends to have a much longer shelf life than the average web application. This is especially important if you plan to use or embed a JavaScript library like Dojo in in a Java component library set that will be used for many years. In this blog I will discuss the Ant based tool we use to re-namespace Dojo for the jMaki Project."
John O'Conner has been
Learning the JavaFX way of doing things.
"I discovered that although using JavaFX Script's declarative syntax to define the visual UI is easy, I was being simple-minded to think I'd be able to just return that whole UI structure to Java."
"I wrote a Hudson plugin to integrate Mercurial VCS to Hudson," writes Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Details in
Mercurial plugin for Hudson.
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Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
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I think you are doing a disservice to the cause of no language changes by labeling us as "conservative" in general and defining language changes as "innovation".
We are neither against innovation nor against tasteful, moderate and measured changes... We are against the madness of adding everything into the language without proper support which ends up with half ass features that no one is happy about (neither the change fans or us).
Furthermore, we think the proper room for "innovation" is not in the language but in the platform and the API and while these are relatively stagnating its not the right time to talk about unnecessary feature X that will make our lives harder rather than easier. BTW When I actually see a working client VM I might reduce the severity of the word stagnating to limping but there are so many real problems that the whole language change BS is just a complete waste of time.
Posted by: vprise on August 13, 2007 at 06:52 PM
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I do not consider myself as being conservative. Not politically and not in daily life. In fact I often had trouble because of taking two steps at once.
But this attitude of shoving any feature without any concept or taste in the Java language, just because C#, Ruby or whatever has it boils my blood.
Progress means that things advance with a concept and a good design ! (Yes, I am a Mac fan). And the most important concept is to keep things as simple as possible but sophisticated enough to do the job.
As cook you would never throw all spices you ever heard about or that taste well in some other meals in one dish and expect that to taste well.
Posted by: aehrenr on August 13, 2007 at 11:04 PM
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We aren't so much conservative as in "resisting change" (which is what the term has come to mean in a world where self-proclaimed "progressives" use it to brand their opponents as backwards) but conservative as in "cautious". Let's all sit down and seriously ponder the consequences of what we're doing rather than jumping in and rushing ahead. Generics (since it's brought up anyway) are a case in point. Had the language extension been more seriously studied and more carefully prepared many of the things that today have people object to them wouldn't have been a problem because they'd never have made it into the language. And generics went through several years' more of study and development, peer review and consideration than does anything under proposal these days. Proposed monday, approved tuesday, coded wednessday, and released on friday after testing on thursday seems to be nearer the timetable.
Posted by: jwenting on August 14, 2007 at 06:03 AM
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There are those who say: If a language is not growing; it is dying. Possibly this may be true, perhaps for natural languages.
However consider: Why is C (created in the '60's) the most popular language amongst kernel hackers?
Maybe because nobody is constantly fu@king changing its definition all the time!
Posted by: cajo on August 14, 2007 at 06:58 AM
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To me, strength of java was that it took most of great things from others, carefully removing anything dangerous.
All this was possible because time passed and creators could clearly choose features that proved to be good and useful.
I think we are going too fast and thus take great risk in going in wrong directions.
"Time will tell" is something both parties could yell over and over. Actually, there are no other justifications each could throw, in the end. As there are language bloat risks being in sight, i would take the "let others try directions, time will tell. Let us be followers, just a bit more." and eventually pass some time refining and clearing actual language and API.
For myself, i think we should mostly concentrate on reviving important APIs so that java becomes more ubiquitous, and more importantly, in a more stable manner. "run everywhere" is not something you can boast about when it comes to handle usb/firewire/video/os integration.
There are enough things to do on that side.
Posted by: pepe on August 14, 2007 at 12:48 PM
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Here's another framework
http://www.mollypages.org
It's pretty clean looking..so this may actually be a sign that not all frameworks are
created equal...
Posted by: javadesigner2 on August 16, 2007 at 10:54 AM
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