Question to Ranchers: Is it Time to Jump Off the Java Bandwagon?

[Bob Hager]

Hi Javaranchers.

Been a java pro most of my career. The latest news from Sun (the defacto Java shepard) are very disheartening. Their share is down the toilet. Analyst believe they have no viable business model, and that they're losing their server market to Microsoft's .Net quickly. Their share outlook has just been downgraded.

Market share isn't the only thing they're losing. Java pioneers are moving to Microsoft's .Net platform. Here is an article:
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/codemonkeybusiness/viewblogpost.htm?p=339271081
Reason: better "development practices, technology, management, and working environment"

Also, today another Sun co-founder jumped off their stationwagon:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/10/23/bechtolscheim-sun-quits-tech-enter-cx_1023sun.html


These are all very bad reports to me, not only do I like Java/Unix and have years and $1000s of hard-earned dollars invested in related training and certifications, but also I HATE working with Microsoft technologies (along with their non-trivial learning curve of proprietary code-generating wizards).

What do you think? Is your business moving away from Java/Unix and into Microsoft? What are your predictions regarding Java/J2EE's future in the Enterprise? Ultimately, did we (Java Professionals) bet on the wrong horse?

Bob

[Warren Dew]

According to the article, Grafter was already working at Google, not Sun.

I don't think C# can ever displace Java as a server side development platform. C# ties you to Windows, and there's just too much of financial advantage to using a free operating system for those running big server farms. Cross platform development is a huge advantage, and Microsoft's business model prevents their actively supporting a cross platform language.

That's not to say Java won't ever be displaced. Lots of people think Python or Ruby are the way to go now. I personally don't agree, but something will undoubtedly come along in time.

I do think that the Java community process has flaws, and has resulted in questionable feature sets in the last couple of releases. On the other hand, I also don't think that Microsoft is capable of producing a better language.

I do think it's a pity Sun can't keep up their level of support. I'm not sure they need to, though. Other players - notably IBM - also have a vested interest in the success of Java.

[Joe Ess]

Originally posted by Bob Hager:
. . .Java pioneers. . .

Pioneer. One guy.
The statement "better development practices, technology, management, and working environment" refers to the Google vs. Microsoft corporate entities, not Java vs. .Net. Microsoft has had plenty of "brain drain" in recent years and nobody is predicting Microsoft or .Net is going away.
Personally, if worst comes to worst and the Java market evaporates I'll pick another language from my toolbox and keep on keeping on.
I don't see that happening (c.f. Cobol, Fortran, C, C++, mainframe, *nix, etc.).

[Arjun Shastry]

Originally posted by Bob Hager:
I HATE working with Microsoft technologies (along with their non-trivial learning curve of proprietary code-generating wizards).
What do you think?

IMO Java, especially J2EE is moving in same fashion of code generating wizards.Visit popular java related sites such as javasoft.com or Apache.Article authors frequently advise readers not to worry much about details or intracacies.Their framework or some open source server will readily do it for you and you need to just focus on 'business logic'.

Is your business moving away from Java/Unix and into Microsoft? What are your predictions regarding Java/J2EE's future in the Enterprise? Ultimately, did we (Java Professionals) bet on the wrong horse?

In India,I see J2EE and Microsoft market in same proportion. In future,I see more demand for MS technologies and LAMP.Java/J2EE will be gradually down because of its own compelxity and load.

[Bear Bibeault]

Originally posted by Bob Hager:
What do you think? Is your business moving away from Java/Unix and into Microsoft?

I've worked for three companies that did the exact opposite. They started with Microsoft stuff thinking it'd give them a quick start and found that it painted them into a corner.

[arulk pillai]

 What do you think? Is your business moving away from Java/Unix and into Microsoft?   

Not at all, have the right people and right choice of Java/JEE related technologies and frameworks on the project. I alsao have experienced similar to what Bear had experienced. As the businees grows, .Net shop becomes a Java shop. Java/JEE is more suited for larger projects.
[ October 25, 2008: Message edited by: arulk pillai ]

[Oscar Johansson]

I think IBM will step up soon to assure its customers that their investments into Java technology will be well protected and supported by IBM.

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, I've seen more bleeding of development into the quick-and-dirty development frameworks like RoR and Django than .Net.

An awful lot of business servers are not Windows, they're Solaris, Linux or some other OS. You can run .Net on Linux using Mono, but I wouldn't bet my business on it.

What happens to Sun is immaterial. Unlike .Net, Java is independent enough of its owner that even if Sun went out of business this afternoon, Java would still be a viable platform.

A lot of Microsoft's success is in its SMB (Small/medium Business) market, where the low initial buy-in costs make it attractive. Since there a LOT of SMBs, Microsoft sells a lot of technology. However in really large businesses, there are places where Microsoft is less welcome. While security is Microsoft's most famous failing, they also are very bad about legacy software. IBM and Sun understand computers where a program, once written, may continue to run with little or no change for 30 years or more. Of course, anything that old isn't in either Java or .Net, it's probably in COBOL, but the point is that IBM and Sun understand that these are applications that can't afford to be subject to the whims of this week's IDE or language specifications.

In Java, there's both compiler compatibility switches and the deprecation option. Both of these go a long way to ensuring that if a critical app needs emergency maintenance, the changes can be made and put into production ASAP. In contrast, I've had to do panic installs of ancient IDE's and even ancient versions of Windows to fix old Windows apps because 6 months after a software system was released, they replaced it with an incompatible one. Consider the revolving door of RDA, DAO, ADO, etc. Or my own personal pet peeve, the SOAP DLLs.

I'm very much against IDE dependencies, based on bad experiences, as I mentioned. My projects are all expected to be buildable in batch, regardless of what IDE I use for my editing. However don't confuse IDEs with libraries. The jakarta stuff is just an optional extension to the core classes that come with Java. It can all be used without any IDE fancier than Windows Notepad. If the only way you can interact with them is using some IDE's wizards, that simply means that you've let yourself become captive to your tools, and, repeating myself, that's why I'm not happy with IDE dependencies.

Truthfully, while Java's market share may be diminishing, it's Microsoft I'd worry about in the longer term. In the OS field, I think they pretty much peaked at XP. In the office field, they could have stopped at Office '97 and relatively few people would have cared. In the general programming area, there's nothing as definitive, but the days when each new product release contained crucial "must-have" features are pretty much over.

We have more hardware horsepower and software than most of us really need. As a result, it has freed us to be more selective about what we use, and selective isn't a good thing for proprietary solutions providers.

[Ken Boyd]

Yeah Adobe Flex, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript library (YUI, Ext-JS) or jQuery, Dojo will work better and yes LAMP is available many years for CMS.

Java is not going anywhere but growth or new stuff is not happening.

Java guru's like Bruce Eckel or Yakov Fain moving towards RIA platform.

Just my observation and look JavaFX took so long that Sliverlight and Flex now dominate (market share or say company prefer)

[Don Stadler]

Originally posted by Tim Holloway:
Actually, I've seen more bleeding of development into the quick-and-dirty development frameworks like RoR and Django than .Net..

Yes. I don't think it's a matter so much of jumping from Java to .NET as learnign some productivity multipliers like RoR or Groovy and Grails.

There is always more stuff to learn. Right now I'm digging into SOA and ESB, and found there was a LOT I didn't know about XML tools which you need to know to be even halfway competent in SOA. This isn't as much about being a Java guy as an SOA guy, and knowing as much of the stack as you can manage.

I fear this means that sometime soon I'll break down and be buying HF C# as a start on learning the M$ stack. Not because I'm jumping from Java. More because after learning JAXB, JAX-WS, WS-1, Mule, JBI, ServiceMix, Apache ActiveMQ, etc, learning about the Dark Side(tm) becomes the next natural step....

Originally posted by Tim Holloway:
What happens to Sun is immaterial. Unlike .Net, Java is independent enough of its owner that even if Sun went out of business this afternoon, Java would still be a viable platform.

We have more hardware horsepower and software than most of us really need. As a result, it has freed us to be more selective about what we use, and selective isn't a good thing for proprietary solutions providers.

Good points. For me I think it's probably a good idea to know both. I'm seeing signs that your analysis about growing companies moving off of .NET is spot on. But to me that means that a guy with serious Java stack skills and some .NET will have a relative advantage for a segment of the job market....

[Henry Wong]

I agree that this question is somewhat loaded -- it implies one language or the another. And quite frankly, this may be true for a newbie, who don't want his/her resume "infected" with anything but the one true language.

But for most of us who has more experience, who has probably forgotten more languages than they could count, and could get up to speed (or back up to speed) on any language / framework in a hiccup, it doesn't make sense to jump "off any bandwagon".

Henry

[Jimmy Clark]

Object technology is the key, however, in my opinion. At a syntax level, there is very little difference between most lanugages. The core principles of iteration, sequential and conditional processing have not changed. The syntax of many languages are very similiar.