[Gllug] OT(ish): Advice

[Sudhir Anand]

On Thursday 12 December 2002 18:17, Simon Stewart wrote:
> On Wednesday, Dec 11, 2002, at 01:27 Europe/London, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> > I must admit that this has always confused me. I see the point of Java
> > in client-side applications, where the cross-platform nature of the
> > software is very useful, but Java on the server is another matter.
>
> Okay. Ever since I used Java on the client side, I've been of a
> slightly different opinion ;)
>
> > Is there any actual reason why I should choose to run server side
> > software on my web server, where I control the platform, in an emulated
> > environment guaranteed to slow everything to a crawl? Is there any sane
> > reason to choose Java over, well, *anything* else that's not running in
> > a JVM? I'm genuinely curious as to why so many people seem to have
> > bought into servlets, and I can only currently rationalize by assuming
> > that Intel are brainwashing people......
>
> First of all, your comment about java being slow is demonstrably
> specious. Startup times might suck, and you could get bitten by GC if
> you're not careful, but with a modern 1.4 JVM it flies. Now, if you'd
> mentioned memory consumption, that would be different, but then again,
> memory's cheap :)
>
> In a word, the "official" reason why people have bought into servlets
> is "scalability" The idea is that you start small on a little i386
> Linux box, and then you take the same application (no rewrites) and
> move to a more powerful machine. When you out-grow the performance
> offered by Intel, you can move to bigger iron, or perhaps to a
> clustered environment. All with the same app --- you don't need to
> start tweaking it. That's the theory.
>
> I used to hate Java. Really loathe its verboseness. I was disgusted by
> its performance. But it's grown on me. I like it that I can take the
> work that I've done on my linux box at home, demonstrate it on to my OS
> X laptop and then run it on a Solaris server without making any changes
> to the code (not even a recompilation) That rocks. I like the huge
> wealth of tools that encourage me to become a better developer, from
> such simple things as junit and commons-logging, to frameworks such as
> WebWork which help simplify app development, to really capable IDEs
> such as Eclipse and IntelliJ's IDEA (which does a pretty neat job of
> refactoring code)
>
> As a developer, then, java has the advantage shared by languages such
> as Perl in that it has a vast and sprawling collection of pre-written
> libraries and tools that do some task and do it well. It's got a
> "professional" image, which perl lacks, and which makes me more
> employable (this in no way disparaging Perl, a language that I've stuck
> up for to Java zealots before) I'm not tied to one vendor (IBM provide
> some of the best java tools, compilers and JVMs) In short, Java is a
> comfortable place to work.
>
> Speedwise, even from reasonably low end hardware I've managed to get
> some pretty serious performance out of the language. It runs on my
> favourite OSs, and I know that when I hand some work to a client, as
> long as it's in pure java, it'll work on theirs too.
>
> And I'll be honest, it's not MS. Others on the list will no doubt make
> this point more articulately then I, but until they have a significant
> track record of supporting more than just their bottom line with proven
> illegal arm twisting, it's going to take a lot to make me want to touch
> their stuff. So I'm a bigot. Shoot me.
>
> OTOH, there's lots that Java can learn from c#, and I think that those
> lessons will be learnt a lot faster than might otherwise be expected.
> And if you wave "it's not native" in my face, and slap you around with
> the CLR ;)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simon

A very good note on Java.  I might even be tempted to learn Java.


Sudhir Anand
Andson

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