(560) What's wrong with Java? A look over the horizon.

Peer-Refereed Talk

Monday, 2007-06-25, 14:00 - 14:40, Arena 6

Aaron Digulla - Globus Shared Service Center (speaker)

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Abstract

What attracts people to languages like Ruby or Groovy? Does it mean anything that we're using more and more external tools like Hibernate and Spring which are configured in XML rather than in Java? When you look into WEB-INF/lib, does your's also contain 100MB of JARs? More and more people are starting to feel uneasy about the current state of Java. We have invested a lot of time and effort into the language, into tools. But still, many standard problems are hard to solve. We've seen the emergence of AOP, ORM mappers, IoC. Configuration files start to become bigger and more complex than the actual code. We see people turn to Ruby and Groovy. And never coming back. Like anything, programming languages age. They have their infancy ("that thing will never catch on"), an adult age (when you can't get a job without knowing it) and, eventually, they die. Where is Java? Obviously, it's not yet time for the deathbed vigil. Great new projects are being started today and will be started in the future. Still. There are people who talk of Java's great time not in the future but the past. If you'd like to join me, I will have a look at some weaknesses of the tool in which we have invested many years of our lives and we will have a look at how other languages solve the same problems. After my talk, I hope that you will be able to answer these questions for yourself: Is Java still the best solution to my problems or has the solution, partly or completely, become one of the main obstacles in my projects? If it has become a liability, what are my options? During the talk, I will take a standard development problem (ORM mapping) and outline solutions in Java, Groovy and Python. We will look at technologies like Hibernate, Grails and TurboGears. We will compare the merits and shortcomings of each solution. The goal will be to learn of new solutions to solve our daily problems in a better way.