[ale] OT: So what about Java?

[matty91 at bellsouth.net]

On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, Jeff Hubbs wrote:

> I'm combing through dozens and dozens of job postings as per usual and I
> see an awful lot of jobs that require Java knowledge as well as J2EE,
> JavaScript, servlets, etc.
>
> Is there anything about this Java mini-universe that simply cannot be
> accomplished through other means that are not tightly tied to one
> company or any company at all?

Java provides a great framework for corporations. If you develop an
application through a standardized framework, porting it elsewhere is
trivial. Case in point, we originally used iPlanet Application server for
J2EE application deployments. Because of issues with the architecture, we
chose to switch to BEA Weblogic, and re-deploy our applications. Since
J2EE provides standard interfaces through JDBC, JNDI, Servlets, JSP, etc.,
we could easily make this change.

>
> I am old-school enough that I distrust languages that are not created
> independently from any corporate interest.  I guess I had a bit of an
> "ah-ha moment" WAAAAY back when I was first studying Pascal in the 1980s
> - that a programming language can be committed to international
> standardization  with all platform-specific implementations being
> subservient to those standards, to the point that implementers would run
> serious political and market-share risks if they "broke" their
> implementation of a given language.
>
> Even when I was in high school, I recall that there were some definite
> non-standardization among implementations of BASIC such that if you were
> used to coding on Data General (as I did) and found yourself writing
> code on another machine (as I did when participating in regional
> programming contests), you needed to know to use parens instead of
> brackets for array index values or whatever.
>
> My opinion is that there is a deep dark danger associated with Java, C#,
> or .NET implementations such that a sharper cookie should look
> elsewhere.  I, personally, am far more interested in the likes of Lython
> or Perl.  Am I off-base about all this?
>

IMHO, Perl is difficult to maintain in large organizations. Fewer
commercial tools and application/web servers support it, and w/o Apache's
mod_perl, performance is not so good. I know I am going to get flack, but
.NET is a great concept. I have read through a bundle of SOAP/XML-RPC
docs, and can see several uses for these technologies. The next year or
two will definately prove interesting!

> - Jeff
>
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