Is advanced Java dying?

Hi,

I now have this double min my head, "Is Advanced JAVA dying?". Note I am not asking whether JAVA is dying, I know it is not. Apart from that what I mean as Advanced JAVA is, specialized JAVA API's built for speech, media, robotics, etc.

Why i ask this question is, JMF was last updated somewhere around 2005, after that nothing! Then some other vendors started building supported API's but it seems they also stopped it after 2007. Very hard to find tutorials, seems like the only remaining tutorial is IBM tutorial.

Java Speech API was last updated long time back, even finding the tutorial or javadock is very hard, all the links are down. After 1999 no good book was written on it. Sun website links were redirected to oracle, but all go to the same information page. The supported technologies for this API like FreeTTS and mbrola also updated YEARS back. Some of the directions they have given are not even compatible with modern Windows.

JAVA robotic API's, I can't remember the name, but I know there are two "Motor" classes, also seems to be lost. A good book was written in year 2001 or something, after that nothing.

I really wanted to learn these things, but now I am so tired by finding the resources!

Seems like all of these have happened after JAVA was taken by Oracle. Don't these people support the POWER OF JAVA rather than always giving solutions for business needs? What do you think, and what do you think about the future of these specialized java technologies?

A lot of special purpose APIs like these are being supported by Open Source projects. IMO, It makes sense for Sun/Oracle to concentrate on core Java functionality while leaving development of specialized APIs to the Open Source community.

Jayesh A Lalwani wrote:A lot of special purpose APIs like these are being supported by Open Source projects. IMO, It makes sense for Sun/Oracle to concentrate on core Java functionality while leaving development of specialized APIs to the Open Source community.

Yes, but as I mentioned above, some famous projects also down or non-updated like FreeTTS, mbrola, FMJ, etc.

Anyway, if you know any free project which deals with these, please let me know

Java, not JAVA. It's not an acronym.

Bear Bibeault wrote:Java, not JAVA. It's not an acronym.

Thanks for mentioning that mistake. I actually used "Shout" system

, but seems like it went wrong

JMF works fine; you're correct that it's dead, though, as far as further development is concerned. If you intend to do something JMF doesn't do, you're going to have to look for some other library (of which there are quite a few).

FreeTTS works fine. Speech technology is too much of a niche to be part of mainstream Java, though. Android has some of it, but if you're looking for more, you're on your own - speech recognition and speech synthesis are the stuff of research.

Not sure about robotics APIs; you'll have to be more specific about what you intend to do.

There seems to be a common theory that if a product isn't updated every few months, then it's "dead". Sometimes this is a correct theory -- there are plenty of open-source projects out there which didn't attract enough committers, or the originators were distracted from working on it. But sometimes the product is just complete, rather than dead, and updating it every few months would just mean bloating it with features of limited value.

I don't know which of these applies to the particular examples you gave, but you shouldn't assume that they are all in the first category.

Sphinx-4 is the major open-source speech recognition engine, and it's written entirely in Java. Of course, it's a bit special-purpose (though not hard to use and well documented). The general-purpose speech APIs are dead because noone wants to use them (both users and developers). Microsoft has built speech APIs into Windows and .NET. Have you ever used an app that took advantage of them? It's shocking that Apple resurrected the speech user interface dream with the Siri iPhone app. Haven't used it myself, but we'll see how well it sticks.

Anyway, "advanced" java is not dying. The stuff java is used for in the server-side world is very, very far from simple. But java has found its niche, and the "java everywhere" dream is shot. Virtually noone writes java applets. Java desktop apps are infrequent (last big one I used, besides Java IDEs, was Azureus, and that got killed by uTorrent which is 5x faster and 100x smaller). And I haven't checked, but I doubt many people use it for embedded/robotics. Oh, I did forget one thing. Java is king on phones. First on dumb phones as JavaME, and now as Android. So not all is lost.

Android has brand-new substitutes for all of the libraries you mention. It has android.speech for recognition, android.speech.tts for synthesis, android.media for playback, and android.* for *. So it's about Java being a very wide ecosystem. Some of its branches (applets/desktop/embedded) have mostly withered, but others are just blooming.

There is JavaFX which is the current focus to add multimedia APIs to Java.

Thanks a lot for everyone for sharing their ideas and knowledge. I am a student who is learning these advanced stuff by my self, so it is a great pleasure for me to see all of these information.

I would like to invite everyone in CodeRanch to continue this discussion and share their knowledge with us

Jesper de Jong wrote:There is JavaFX which is the current focus to add multimedia APIs to Java.

Thanks for the info. Installed the SDK, netbeans 7.1 and started learning