There is some hype with languages like Python (that I like very much) and Ruby but I was writing a medium-size system in Python and feel the lack of some tools that I would have if I was using Java: Eclipse features, JUnit integration and some language-features like catching some errors in compile time.
Some people says that Java is dead as a language. But large important software are written in Java: Hadoop, Lucene and many others.
Is Java a better language than Python or Ruby for medium/large infrastructure software like these?
This kind of question can get very argumentative... For enterprise software most of time the key factor is political, not technical.
If you own the business, stick with the technology that best fits your vision. If not, use Java - it is politically safer.
On the technical field, it is almost a tie.
You make a valid point in saying that Java is more suited to enterprise software. That's really where Java shines: it works very well for enterprise programming.
However, your gripes about the tools in Python and Ruby are unfounded. PyDev for Eclipse takes full advantage of the same features that you would enjoy if you were developing in Java. Ruby has a similar plugin for Eclipse. Unit testing frameworks like pyunit, nose, and others exist for both languages (and I believe PyDev has support for unit tests). Also, just like a Java compiler would catch an error at compile time, a Python script will give syntax errors before you run it, along with an (IMO) much more understandable error system than a Java compiler.
Since Python and Ruby are scripting languages, their area of expertise lies more in small tasks, rapid development, and using frameworks like Django or Rails. So yes, more heavy-duty languages like Java are great for enterprise, but there's something to be said for the elegance and ease of use of Python and Ruby.
All much of a muchness really. There are features in Python/Ruby that your aware of that make them a more appealing offering than say Java. Static typing can be your best friend most of the time, and a pain for the other.
Lack of tooling is related to adoption. Java/c# has a larger adoption.
Corporates/Enterprises and medium to large organizations, like to procure solutions with contracts as opposed to technical merits.
From experience Python does have some speed issues, I can't comment on Ruby, but I imagine that if your applications require dedicated speed I would not use python.
Also threading and multi-core processing is not as good as it could be in python, although 2.7 seems to improve a lot of the old problems, I think the GIL problem still remains for threading.
My only comment on Java is that it now has Oracle behind it, and depending where your sitting and how you like Oracle, might change your attitude to Java. especially if your designing for Open Source solutions.
What is their official position towards clojure?
Why should Sun/Oracle (as a whole), empoyees, or any of the millions of users of said Java libraries or JVM care about Clojure except how Clojure is beneficial (or detrimental) to individual tasks?
The question is, well, silly at best.
Clojure will not replace Java -- it was not even designed to -- and, if anything, simply showcases the adaptability of the JVM (and the layers of hacks used to support dynamic languages in relatively efficient ways). Hopefully the JVM will flourish and improve (and will have better support for "non-Java" programming models).
There is no reason at all why sun might be "not too excited" about alternative JVM languages (and there are lots of languages besides Clojure: Groovy, Scala, JRuby, Jython, even JavaFX which is from Sun itself).
I think all those new languages are important for the JVM, and Sun is actively working on adding support in the JVM for alternative programming languages (see JSR 292, for example).
It's not like as if Sun wants everybody to use the Java programming language only...
Sun is not a single mind. You will find opinions on clojure that are all over the map:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=site%3Ablogs.oracle.com+clojure&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
And don't forget, a lot of non-Java languages running atop the JVM can take advantage of those vast libraries, both within the JDK and without. I think Sun generally approves of such reuse.
I don't know of any "official" position of Clojure. You may have seen reports of work on supporting dynamic languages on the JVM and hosting JVM language summits at the Santa Clara campus. The general attitude seems to be, if you want to do some programming, please come and do it on the JVM.
The most optimistic success case for Clojure is probably defined relative to the other Lisp variants. Should Clojure lead the Lisp army (unlikely, BTW, but that's another question) it still would not have much economic effect.
And if it doesn't have much economic effect, then it won't really have a conventional wisdom inside a corporation. Individuals there will like it and dislike it, but as a company, they just won't care one way or another.
Should hell freeze over and then everone starts developing in Clojure, the company probably still wouldn't care, they would just find a way to adapt and live in the new ecosystem. As time went on a story would develop about how it was all their idea to start with.
Let me first of all say that I'm NOT interested in a flame war about what is better: .NET or Java... PLEASE don't post if you want to tell me how killer .NET is or how Microsoft is the evil empire so there is no way that a developer with a soul could write .NET or whatever. We've all heard it far too much before.
What I'm interested is who out there in the industry can really accurately and fairly compare and contrast the details of the two platforms. I'm looking for the rare industry luminaries who are experts in both platforms and discuss the two in reasonable terms. The only dude I'm aware of in this realm is Ted Neward if that gives you an idea of what I'm looking for. Ultimately I'm interested in their opinion of how the two platforms influence each other and what new things happening on one side are working well (which might give me insight about how the other platform is likely to evolve).
Martin Fowler has written about both.
Ron Jeffries would be another who has written a lot about java and has more recently written a fair bit about C#
I'm no Ted Neward, but I'm reasonably experienced in both Java and C#.
Despite Microsoft's early draft of the C# spec claiming that it is a mixture of C++ and VB, clearly Java was a massive influence. Since C# 1.0, however, I would argue that C# has been the language driving innovation. (Okay, a lot of the new features have already been present in other languages, but not Java...)
A lot of the proposed features from Java 7 look very much like they've been influenced by C#, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were under consideration before C# got them (just like generics in Java were being developed for years, and in the other direction there were research projects with generics in .NET before .NET 1.0 was even released).
What does the future hold? Well, personally I'd like to see a true Java 2.0 which ditches backward compatibility in order to clean up some of the messes of the past - and largely make it like C#, but with the existing platform independence. Nothing in the language of C# is tied to Windows. From that side of things, it's a real shame that Mono hasn't gone further (or been supported by Microsoft, other than Moonlight).
I have worked with both platforms since .NET was created, mostly in dual-language projects.
Java is the "spanish" of languages (written spanish has changed little for the last few hundred years or so), C# is english (most of us are unable to read 200 year old english literature)
C# has "all the bells and whistles" added nice and clean into the language. Java is fairly primitive in comparison.
Java has a huge choice of competing libraries and different ways/styles of coding, .NET is much more "single choice"; often a good choice has been done by microsoft for you. These arguments objectively lead no-place in particular; some people may consider having a lot choice is good, others may think it is an unnecessary expense. My current java project is using NONE of the libraries I used in a similar project 5 years ago; so although the language is the same the programming environment (libraries, IDE) has improved by an astonishing amount.
So as a developer I prefer C#. Still, by choice, I work in Java right now, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - still by choice. Although java the language evolves painfully slowly, there area a lot of really interesting things going on in java. The rest of my choice is based on all the things you specifically don't want to talk about; openness, the dark side and all that.
The company I work for has about half of it's development in Java (internal apps) and half in .Net (public facing apps). What is it that you want to know? there are several people in the company I work at that can contrast and compare. I admit to not knowing Java all that well though. Are you looking for specific articles, bloggers, or books?
If you are looking for a person which has compaired both frameworks Java vs .Net, then I do not have a name, however there is one KEY phrase I would like to make you very aware of
Type erasure
Generics in Java <- its mentioned here, I came accorss this by word of a work friend. (Im not sure when there will be a fix for this)
This would mean java will always be boxing and unboxing.
with reference to krosenvold
Java has a huge choice of libraries
and different ways of coding, .NET is
much more "single choice". This is
good and bad both ways.
Im not quite sure what he means by this. If i were to second guess this, you are referencing .Net's DataTable. and how .Net (used) to be data centric not domain driven?
If so I would like to mention .Net has a movement called "Alt.Net" AKA "NHibernate Mafia" where there are a number of open source libraries to allow the .net developer to do ORM/DI/MVC/TDD etc. With many of the libraries having roots from the Java world (spring, hibernate) However this is not core to the .Net or even Java Frameworks.
I would suggest considering what you want to compare.
for instance
Frameworks (including the
community/opensource ones)
Limitations (Java is 1 language, but
works on multi OS, .Net is multi
languge, yet "offically" supports
windows platforms, using Mono)
Avaliable IDE's
Here are some links to get you started.
Comparison of the Java and .Net platforms
Comparison of Csharp and Java (look for instance, they handle Enumerations differently)
HTH
Bones
Yesterday #headius / Charles Nutter came up with a very interesting idea on twitter:
#danny_l Gafter made the same mistake; I don't mean a forked Java any more than Groovy is a fork. I want a "mostly Java" with closures.
or the reply by #danny_l / Danny Lagrouw:
#headius or could the BGGA prototype be "bolted on" any future version of Java? That might be useful
That really is what I would like to see as well. Can't we have some sort of bytecode preprocessor to make the BGGA prototype work on any modern Java version? I mean scala, Groovy and JRuby have closures and produce valid bytecode!
I would even like to help and put effort in it. Although I don't really know where to start.
(the above is an excerpt of the blogpost I wrote about this topic)
What do others think of this idea?
The word 'preprocessor' takes me back to C++ and it scares me.
There is a weird dichotomy: I celebrate the diverse garden of languages on the JVM, but I think that "Mama Bear" (aka Java) should not become fragmented like this. We need a solid foundation.
That said, I am in favour of BGGA closures. I also think a language should provide its full capabilities. If a team has people who can't handle closures (or generics, or threading (!!)), then that team should police itself through code reviews and static analysis.
Maybe one idea would be to have a compile-time switch to 'disallow' advanced features like this but even that seems a bit harsh.
I think the 'bolt-on' idea is really trying to address the fractured leadership in the Java space. That problem strikes as being more political and diplomatic than technical.
The problem with making these things a bolt on is that you create a fragmented language.
The java language is the smallest part of what makes java, java. The libraries and the culture make up the larger part. Making closures and generics a bolt on means that either they cannot be used in the core libraries or that the core libraries would require the bolt on to be present in the SDK being used. This would at best create fragmentation within the libraries (as some developers work to the core and some require the bolt-on) and at worst would mean that we will start having 'distributions' of java in the manor of java each containing a different set of jars and 'bolt-ons'.
I would say this is the start of a slippery slop I would rather stay off of.
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Why would you choose java over others? Why did you choose java to program your application?
Please include what you are using java for (desktop application/ web application/ mobile).
Excellent tooling: IDE, CI, etc.
Vast array of 3rd party libraries.
Huge amount of documentation available.
Large pool of developers available.
Platform ubiquitous.
Excellent performance.
Excellent specification.
Sturdy garbage collection.
Managed memory.
Native threads.
Choice - implemented by multiple vendors.
I have used Java to build various middle-ware products: Inventory mgmt; CMS; chemical registration; etc.
One of the nice things about Java is that everyone knows it. Of course, now that I've said that, I'll get 80 comments from people claiming to have never learned the language. Be that as it may...
Like it or not, Java is the closest thing to a lingua franca (the idiom means "common language") we have in the industry today. Just about every has either used Java at some point, or (more commonly) is actively using it now. That sort of ubiquity can be extremely attractive to some companies, particularly those reliant on consultants. If you start a project in Java, you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to find talent to maintain the code base for years down the road.
On a different tack, Java is an excellent language for developing cross-platform desktop applications...it's just that nobody knows it. Most of Java's dominance is on the server side coupled with a little bit of love from the J2ME crowd. However, if you objectively consider Swing in Java 6uN, it's hard to find a better tool for the job. Don't get me wrong, I see that it has its flaws, but many of those have been fixed in recent releases. Most of the issue now is mindshare: everybody knows that Java is slow and ugly (neither of which is strictly true anymore). The other problem is that Swing is very much a cross-platform UI toolkit. This means that it is inherently much harder to create professional UIs in Swing than in Cocoa or even WinForms.
Finally, a really great reason to pick Java (as opposed to .NET or Objective-C) is the ecosystem. Other answers have mentioned libraries, which really deserve a significant spotlight; but I'm thinking specifically of the rising language diversity. If you write an application in Java today, you can seamlessly transition to Scala at any time. You also have the option to do scripting in Groovy or JRuby, not to mention taking advantage of the powerful concurrency abstractions in Clojure. Because of its portability and high-level nature, the JVM is increasingly the preferred target for language compilers and interpreters (even more than the CLR). Java is really at the center of that nexus, not really benefiting directly from the vast cloud of languages which swarm around it, but certainly deriving value from all of the interoperability, present and future.
My reasons for prefering Java over other programming languages at this time are:
price - it's free
performance - really fast these days thanks to the HotSpot JIT compiler
effectiveness - lots of power with rigorous features like type-safe, sand-boxed, etc.
OOP capability
very good, well-thought out exception handliing; C++ exceptions are the opposite!
portability - it runs on almost everything
tool availability - awesome IDEs like Eclipse & NetBeans are free, as are web servers like Tomcat and application servers (JBoss, Glassfish, Geronimo, etc.)
flexibility - does graphics, desktop GUIs, web user interfaces - all kinds of things in all kinds of runtime environments
aptness - many enterprise apps today have to support HTML, SQL, and XML - Java has good support for all of them built in and you can get third-party libraries for free that make this even easier/better
well-supported - Sun keeps adding improvements and fixing thing going one or two versions back
forward compatibility - unlike something like VB which undergoes wrenching change in its syntax every couple versions or so, Java's syntax and semantics seem about 99.9% upward compatible from version to version
I have been writing programs in Java for over a decade and I am pretty satisfied with it. I have used other languages for almost two decades before that. So I am not biased by describing the one thing I know - it is one of many languages I know intimately.
When upgrades to the JDK/JRE come out, I look the documentation over to see what is changed. Sun is good about telling/explaining this. I have never had an extremely rough time porting from one JDK to the next.
When I have switched from one OS to another as my main OS at home or at work, it has not caused a problem for the Java applications I write - or the tools I use, generally. The one exception is Borland JBuilder, which some Borland marketing or technical genius decided to frequently stop supporting. Eclipse and Netbeans run terrifically on the Mac and probably always will. I have used Java on:
MS-Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, XP
Sun Solaris/SunOS Unix
IBM AIX
Mac OS X
Linux
Motorola cell phones (MIDP, CLDC)
Palm Pilot PDA
Java VMs (virtual machines) are everywhere! They are in:
web browsers
cell phones
PDAs
desktop computers
web servers
application servers
I have written programs on all of these. All you have to do is get an IDE with the right plugins, get the API documentation for the target environment you want, and start programming.
The GUI programs I write actually do look & work correctly on different platforms! I cannot tell you how long other vendors promised to do and how often/long they have failed. Just look around, some still exist.
Sun promised this in Java 1.0 and they sort of delivered it with AWT. However, the abstract windowing toolkit used native GUI components and the differences between these components (which followed no unifying standard at all) were too great to get same/nice look/behavior on all platforms.
Sun delivered very well upon this portable GUI promise when the Swing GUI API was delivered a decade ago, back in December 1998.
1) Very good and free documentation
2) Very good developer commercial and free tools
3) good certification and training resources
4) good runtime and free tools
5) good profiling and monitoring tools
6) very good support options from various companies
7) very good open source community with huge amount of libraries
Things not yet mentioned:
Cross-platform Desktop Application, even with sophisticated GUI
bunch of tools
static typing (see GWT)
error messages at compile time
very clear error messages
Java provides a very rich API right out of the box and hands-down produces the most portable applications since there is a Java VM for almost every platform.
BTW: I haven't used Java since I left college since I work for a Microsoft shop, but I can't think of a single thing I can do in C# that I can't do in Java, whether it be enterprise applications, web applications, or desktop applications.
Portability is the key to java. I know that a program that i am coding will run on any system, there is no need to create different releases for different OS's.
Java also offers built in security, making the coding of the safe programs easier.
Java is fast, with clean code java is benchmarking in the same range as C++.
C# is the language that gets compared to java the most often. C# isn't as portable as java, and has very few features that java doesn't. This makes java much more attractive unless the program will ONLY be run on a single OS, in that case i might code it in C++.
I switched from years of C++ to Java because I was working on higher level stuff and needed the benefits of memory management, reflection, and sandboxed execution that I get with Java.
I have tried COM in the late nineties and could not touch it.
.NET looks promising and in many ways is now much better than Java. Unfortunately, being window-centric is a complete dealbreaker for me.
Another benefit is the awesome static analysis tools available e.g. FindBugs. These perform a lot of checking on your code above and beyond those performed by the compiler, and can help identify bugs and/or code smells before testing begins.
Lots of great reasons have already been mentioned. I'd like to add the political part. I trust Suns language a lot more than Microsoft alternatives. It's not because I hate Microsoft, it's just that Sun is going a direction with Java that I really like, and Microsoft is going a direction with .net etc. that I really don't like.
This is very subjective, I know. But to me it seems like Sun really want to create a great language, and try to make money somehow. While Microsoft seems more interested in making money by vendor lock-in and systems that looks great and feels great, but may not be as good as it looks in the long run.
So the way Microsoft is handling it right now, I don't even care about how good or bad it is, technically. I don't care, I'm not going to use it.
Java has everything I want from this kind of programming language, including all the boring political stuff most people just skip. I don't know about any other current language that has all that.
The main reason I use Java for most of my desktop app projects is for cross-platform compatibility. It's quite easy to make your app run on OS X, Windows, and Linux and look native on all platforms.
I use Java for our BPM platform and used Java in the past for enterprise web apps.
It depends on what you want to do. Considering language features, libraries available and IDE experience, I personally would choose C# over Java. C# 3.0 has many useful features that Java lacks, such as LINQ, Lambda expressions, etc. Some people prefer the huge library choice that is available for Java, but I think there are just too many ways of doing things. Java IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans are getting better, but I think Visual Studio is still much easier to work with.
Of course,if you are not using Windows, you don't have much of a choice but to choose Java. Ruby and Python can be good options for things like utility apps and GUIs, including Web apps, but for enterprise apps that don't use Windows, Java is pretty much the only option.
Please don't follow blindly all java-entousiasts. Java has its own flaws. Java is great for rapid development, enterprise oriented stuff, and "high productivity" project (with the tons of projects, community,...).
And if one guy show me a benchmark highlighting how java code can be as optimal as C stuff doesn't mean the complete java solution is fast and lightweight.
Java will never find its way on some performance critical applications, like games, codecs, web browser. No major game software is developed in java, and not because the developper are not capable of writing one piece of Java code that has the same speed as C or C++, this is because the very limitations of the language involves that performance and memory consuption will never reach a good C/C++ code. Takes VisualStudio and Eclipse. Java is great for one stuff (productivity stuff, enterprise middleware), but if you want to write codecs, games, performance critical libraries, you'd better try knowing C.
But, one the other hand, you'll write the java code faster and safer, with C and C++ you're taking more risk (pointers!) and this takes usually more time.
And don't forget the joke "Write once, Debug everywhere", this is actually true. You have to deal with different JVM implementation nightmare with Java.
Other programming language have their interest, bash/python scripts for local scripts (repetitive action, fast and quick UI,...). Php or ruby for webapplication are very well deployed and documented on the web.
Using it for desktop applications.
Excellent IDEs available, wonderful API, "C-style" syntax makes it easy to pickup. Once the JVM starts, the performance is great.
Why would I choose Java - is it the most popular language out there right now? If not, it's gotta be damn close, so if I'm building a product I might choose this because it would be the easiest to hire developers for.
Why did I choose Java - because it's what I know best.
Why would I choose Java? If I happened to have a team of replaceable code monkeys developers that knew Java better than anything else, that is probably what I'd go with.