Should we just learn Java?

21st November 2007

As a wandering web designer cum developer and now occasional consultant I’m generally pretty technology agnostic. At some point or another I’ve written HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, C#, Python and Rails for a living – often on the same day. But something has me thinking and I thought I’d see what other people thought as well.

That thing is Java. I have books on Java. I’ve done the usual examples (hello world in 20 lines for instance). I didn’t really like it and left it at that. But a few presentations, both from Google, at both Future of Mobile and @media Ajax got me thinking. First you have Android in the mobile space which Dave Burke did a good job of making look pretty interesting. Then you had the guys from Ajaxian talking about using Java for everything.

A few other thinks to throw into the pot. Beyond Java is an interesting read – summing up with a call for more fragmentation and for small nimble languages to be used where it makes sense. Oh, and I think Tom is busy learning Java as well. Mmmmm.

Some good coverage around of both conferences and I know my first impression was basically this way lies madness. But it would have been more interesting had their been a few more Java people around to argue with.

Note that I’m not advocating a Google like disregard for the web here. Markup really matters, I happen to disagree with Douglas and think CSS rocks and I love writing Javascript. But should we just learn Java anyhow and try to subvert some of the existing tools to be more web like?

Comments

I’m about where you are with Java, except in a previous life, I had the pleasure of doing Java sysadmin with large, busy, tomcat farms. After that experience, I never wanted to touch Java as a programmer.

However, it seems it is a fairly useful language to just know but never actually use for anything. Speaking with Tom Morris myself over the weekend at Brighton Hack Day, he said that alot of the reason for him deciding to learn Java is just because the implementations for various things he wants to do work with (all that XMLy stuff he’s involved with, FOAF and RDF etc) tend not to be very complete in anything but Java.

There’s a case there to learn Java just so you can port the stuff out and never have to use Java again ;).

Mark Ng - 21st November 2007
[...] can read the full story here Der Beitrag wurde am Wednesday, den 21. November 2007 um 06:53 Uhr veröffentlicht und wurde [...]

dashda > Blog Archiv > Should we just learn Java? - 21st November 2007
I’m learning it only because the technologies which are the bread and butter of the Semantic Web – XML and RDF – have libraries which only seem to be well-implemented in Java. The only XSLT 2.0 processor is SAXON, which is available on Java or .NET – and Java is more cross-platform than .NET. Similarly, Jena is probably the most full-featured RDF library and it’s written… in Java. JavaScript, Python and Ruby are much nicer languages. What I really want is some of the better Java libraries made available outside the Java platform.

I need to look into Android too, but at the moment it’s got an uphill battle if it’s going to convince developers that it’s worth spending time on compared to either mobile Web apps or J2ME.

Tom Morris - 21st November 2007
It seems Mark made my point for me. ;)

Tom Morris - 21st November 2007
Nothing wrong with Java, nothing at all. Wonderful language, can do lots of good stuff, has lots of good libraries, fairly good use of patterns in it’s idiom. I’m tired of hearing people bitch about it because they’d rather use something that is specialized to do a simple thing only, but with less code.
```
Btw, what's this about 20 lines for 'hello world'? Start counting:
class HelloWorld {
 public static void main(String args[]) {
  System.out.println("Hello World");
 }
}
```
phloidster - 26th November 2007
We’re using jRuby here as a way to get the best of both worlds and Oracle are playing with it too. It seems like interesting ways are emerging to bridge between static and dynamic languages…

Mike Stenhouse - 27th November 2007
I do Java at my current job, for about 6 months now, web stuff. I remember one line from my boss when I first started: “Python, Ruby, PHP they’re all hackish languages. Java is the king.”
I personally love it. I trust the base, because its like nothing I’ve ever seen, its stable and beautifully built from ground up.
For everything else i try to keep myself open for anything, i love switching languages and trying new ideas with other things.
There’s no such thing as “I’m gonna stick with this language”.

Luca - 27th November 2007
Although I’ve never used Charva for a web project, so I can’t pass intelligent comment on it’s use/abuse for making standards-compliant sites, surely what’s output should be independent of the tools used to produce it? So if you can write an awesome back-end in Java, then go for it?

That said, although Java is a beautiful language, I can’t see myself rushing to use it, because as I get older as a programmer, I just find myself programming in a stricter, more OO way in PHP (casts left right and centre). One argument says that I should stop ‘messing around’ in my ‘hackish’ language and just use a language which fits the way I program by design, but I don’t agree. The beauty of a ‘hackish’ language is that I can program in a java-esque way to the degree which makes sense for the task at hand, and switch to something a bit more wild west when circumstances demand…

Skip Chris - 29th November 2007
“That said, although Java is a beautiful language”

Have you used Java 5? The bolted on Generics makes an already verbose language absolutely painful to read and use. Coupled with type erasure( the backward compatible argument falls flat for about 500 reasons ), it is a waste. Inner classes? An ugly hack to make up for the lack of proper closures.

Java has some good things about it, I’m not totally slamming it as crap, but there are better designed languages that could be even better if they received all the time and attention that Java gets.

Question? Why the heck are you casting in PHP? I have not used it since version 4, did they add strong typing?

Foo Kung - 17th December 2007

Comments are now closed.