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It's time to move on
Posted by felipeal on October 05, 2003 at 08:16 PM | Comments (11)
There's been a lot of talk lately about how Tiger (J2SE 1.5) is going to make Java easier to develop with, bringing it to the masses (or as Sun call it, to the "corporate developers"). I have no doubt that this promise *will* be fullfilled. My question is: *when* will that happen?
I'm not even talking about Tiger's release schedule here - although I'm also afraid it's is a little bit late already. My main concern is how long it will take for this release to be used by commercial products. Take as example J2SE 1.4: it's been available for years, and a lot of products - specially J2EE servers - still uses 1.3. I understand the fear of using a new major release right after it's available, but gee, we are talking about a very stable product, which recently reached it's 3rd version (1.4.2).
This "late adoption" trend is really bad: there is dozens of cool features available on 1.4 (like assert, logging and nio) that can't be used in many projects because they are bound on 1.3. That's not to mention the minor improvements, like new methods on existing classes that causes hard-to-debug NoSuchMethodException when you a deploy a class compiled with 1.4 in a 1.3 JVM. And now with Tiger and its language changes, this situation can be even worse, as the IDEs have to adapt themselves to these changes...
So, in order to reach the 10M developers mark, it's necessary a bigger effort than just providing new tools and APIs: it's necessary to move on!
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Comments
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Java not so widely available
The problem with moving on to the next version of Java isn't so much that developers don't want to, but that the latest version of Java isn't available on all the target platforms. Remember that Sun only provide a JVM for Windows, Solaris and Linux, if you want a JVM for Mac OS, AIX, BSD, etc, etc you have to wait for someone else to come up with a port and they only get to start their port when Sun releases their version.
So no, we don't need faster developer adoption, we need magical fairies to come along and do all that porting work for us and make the latest version of Java release everywhere simultaneously.
Posted by: ajsutton on October 05, 2003 at 08:27 PM
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Java not so widely available
That's a good point, but I think that shouldn't be an excuse for the commercial vendors not using newer releases on their products. Chances are that by the time they finish porting a product to a newer release, that newer release would be available on more platforms.
Posted by: felipeal on October 05, 2003 at 08:41 PM
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Java not so widely available
Commercial vendors need a significant amount of time to test their products with the lastest release of a JVM and that can only happen after the final JVM is released on each of the supported platforms. So they can only start their upgrade process after the JVM is released on each of their target platforms, hence the long delay in people moving to newer versions of Java.
Frankly, I'd prefer to be stuck using well tested, reliable products on an older JVM than using less-tested bleeding edge products.
Besides, the Java 1.3 VM and even 1.2 aren't lacking anything earth shattering that the Java 1.4 VM has. Then again, I'm not using nio which is the big thing that was added in 1.4 and not available anywhere else.
Posted by: ajsutton on October 05, 2003 at 11:16 PM
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Business is risk adverse
No manager is going to rush out a product on 1.4.x until it has been tested. And since 1.4 has had many bugs affecting many uses those products have to wait until the bugs are fixed in 1.4.1 or 1.4.2.
So 1.4.x is still too new for most.
I bet if you could ask around within Sun you'd find that the IT group there hasn't switched over either because 1.4.x is still too unstable.
Posted by: dukefetish on October 06, 2003 at 08:17 AM
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Java not so widely available
[quote]Besides, the Java 1.3 VM and even 1.2 aren't lacking anything earth shattering that the Java 1.4 VM has.[/quote]
I agree not everybody needs the new APIs, but 1.4 has some major perfomance benefits and bugfixes that make it a must-have.
Posted by: skippy on October 07, 2003 at 05:33 AM
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JDK 1.4
I disagree strongly with the first poster. 1.4 is not buggy in my experience. As well, if bugginess is a problem, then sticking with 1.3 is egregiously illogical, since 1.4 will contain many fixes for these problems!
Regarding the Mac releases, I have read that they shoot for a release just 60 days after the Sun release. That is pretty impressive, considering the size of the job.
Posted by: johanley on October 08, 2003 at 05:44 AM
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Java not so widely available
Swing comes to mind as the main performance improvement. We are on Websphere 4.0.4 with the 1.3 IBM JDK, but have deployed Swing clients on the Sun 1.4 JDK. RMI between the two is a challenge, but there are ways to work around the problems using reflection.
Of course these upgrade path problems are not new. Back in the day, we were using PowerJ (Sybase's now defunct IDE) with the optional Swing libraries for JDK 1.1. One big promotion point for PowerJ was the pluggable JDK. When we tried plugging in the 1.2 JDK with the included Swing Libraries all heck broke loose. After experiencing the "joy" of tech support, they conceded that the JDK was not really pluggable after all.
Posted by: john_watts on October 08, 2003 at 06:42 AM
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version upgrade is slow at best
There is no doubt that companies should upgrade their version of the java platform every once in a while, but thats not always whats economical for the company. I recently had this discussion with my project manager and the idea of upgrading from 1.3.1 to 1.4.2 was shot down b/c of system tests and the time that would be needed to assure that all of the 1.3 code would indeed run in the 1.4 environment. I agree that some sort of effort should be made to make this transition easier for developers and employers who have code that is bound to a certain runtime. At the moment certain things can 'break' if you upgrade and companies just dont want to take that risk. Can sun somehow make this version transition easier? because i would love to take advantage of the new features in 1.4 and 1.5 when it comes out. COME ON SUN YOU CAN DO IT! I got faith!
Posted by: puppetmasta on October 08, 2003 at 01:58 PM
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Java not so widely available
horrible argument. The reason no one switches is that they need to perform system tests, and user acceptance testing before a new version can be certified for use. Not b/c its not available, i mean...come on.
Posted by: puppetmasta on October 08, 2003 at 02:00 PM
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version upgrade is slow at best
At my work, the problem is not the testing of new JDK's, but another important factor: the adoption of new JDK's in enterprise servers of our customers.
We have code written for a certain enterprise server with a certain version, which has an old version of JDK (say 1.2.2). If we write a server application for them, it MUST be written against JDK 1.2.2 or lower to work properly. We can't force our customers to upgrade their server, so we must adapt to this situation.
Of course we can write code to other customers using JDK 1.4, but we like to reuse code, so we must be very careful with our common libraries and make them 1.2.2 compliant (we must use a lowest common JDK with them).
Posted by: xmirog on October 09, 2003 at 12:29 AM
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forward this to the Swing Team
I get the impression that the Swing Team has been late to adopt a lot of new and not-so-new features and APIs as well, like Collections. I base this on personal observation and comments I've seen made in online discussions from some folks at Sun.
Regardless, it is finally to the point with Swing and 1.4.2 where I think a lot of desktop apps can be developed using Java, finally, and not lag so horribly far behind native apps. But, the Swing team is maybe being reactive too often and not pro-active?
For example if they would have added anti-aliased fonts, alpha blending, etc. to Swing components across the board back a few years ago in the Win2K era, they would have made Java apps look better than a lot of native apps. But now, they're scrambling to catch up to XP with Tiger.
Posted by: bwy on October 23, 2003 at 10:50 AM
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