We Keep Coding

Drop-in replacement for MICO Corba?

We are currently using MICO to establish the communication between a server and a client, where the client is a simulator written in C++ and the server is a java program displaying an animation of what happens in the simulation. It seems that the developemt of MICO has slowed down to an almost halt and bugs that only allow us to hack around them (as we don't have the time to first figure out which parts of MICO are responsible for codegeneration and so on) keep us from making real progress.
So, does any one of you know of a good drop-in replacement? We would like to have the following:
The compiler can generate both C++ and Java-Code from the idl.
The project should still show considerable support.
The implementation should be open-sourced (GPL or BSD, or something alike), as we use our programs to teach students as well.
The migration from MICO should be as easy as possible. (This is not a hard requirement, but would be a good thing)
I found some other CORBA implementations, e.g. TAO, but I didn't find any of which I could
say that they are still supported. Correct me if I am wrong here.

The Free CORBA® Downloads page might be of interest to you.

Just naming:
orbit2 1, also pyorbit etc.
omniORB
TAO (has already been mentioned)
1 On my Ubuntu box, apt-rdepends -r liborbit2 returns 5530 lines...

I don't know where CORBA or MICO in particular has gone in the last 5 years, but back then a drop in replacement was not really possible, since differences between vendors where still there.
Not necessarily API differences (POA, etc.) but
in implementation behavior,
in custom extensions which were required to make it work in a real-world environment (threading, load balancing, security, etc.),
in how the development tools worked
and also about the whole deployment or runtime story.
We had Orbix ASP/2000/Whatever and ORBacus which were interchangeable having a small compatibility layer, some Makefile framework to hide differences in tools (e.g. the IDL compiler) and some scripts for wrapping ORB specific processes.
Unfortunately, ORBacus has long been bought by (then) IONA, which already make Orbix. IONA itself has been bought by someone else (I forgot). The original authors of ORBacus, plus some devs from IONA Orbix, changed their ways somewhat and produced Ice, which is not CORBA but somewhat alike - of course without the glitches ;-)
Concerning TOA, I think it would be the "best" choice concerning still being developed as it is driven by research on the Washington University. But last time I looked, they didn't have Java implementation but people seemed to use JacORB.
Maybe all this helps you little, unless it brings even more confusion :-)

TAO as C++ ORB is still actively supported and developed (see http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/commercial-support.html). For Java I would propose JacORB.
On http://www.orbzone.org there is an overview of available corba implementations.

For improving my programming skills I want to follow "learn a new language a year". What we can learn in 2011

I want to learn a new programming language in 2011. I am a java progmrammer, with not more than a year experience. I want to learn something which is really new and exciting, but not related to mobiles (iPhone, Android, iPad, Symbian).

I would suggest that you should give Scala a try.Its a language which runs on JVM and it is very much like Java syntactically,so you can easily pick up.Python is another good option.

Learn Rich Internet Application development (RIA). This is "new and exciting", especially if you don't care about mobile stuff. This means (and both of these primary languages, C# and ActionScript, are similar enough to Java that you'll easily meet your 1 year goal):
Silverlight / WPF Language=C# and xaml (Microsoft has come a long way in a short time with this and the quality of the tools in comparison to what's out there for Java/Flex stuff is impressive.)
Adobe Flex Language=ActionScript and mxml (If you want to stay in Java this is probably your better choice. For the record, Java/Flex is my primary skill set and has been for years, but as I've said above, their .NET equals are very attractive nowadays and I'm starting to learn C#/WPF/Silverlight now as a result.)
(JavaFX perhaps also, but I've never used it and it's widely not considered as mature as the other two.)
Techs like these are very well suited to controlled environments such as the business world (internal intranets) where it's easy to push out Flash player or Silverlight to all workstations you need it on. (So it's nice on a resume if you're job seeking.) In the Internet world it's a little more iffy, but still not too bad since deployment rates for Flash 9+ are pretty good now, and Silverlights are quickly rising as well.
"AJAX" and all it's dependent "stuff" (DHTML, DOM, CSS, etc etc) is common, but I wouldn't consider it new or particularly exciting. It's a bigger deal in the mobile scene where a lot of hardware either can't run more advanced virtual machine environments or they're intentionally crippled in an attempt to prevent this (Apple products).

Google created a new language this year called "Go". You could give that a try.
From the Go home page:
The Go programming language is an open
source project to make programmers
more productive. Go is expressive,
concise, clean, and efficient. Its
concurrency mechanisms make it easy to
write programs that get the most out
of multicore and networked machines,
while its novel type system enables
flexible and modular program
construction. Go compiles quickly to
machine code yet has the convenience
of garbage collection and the power of
run-time reflection. It's a fast,
statically typed, compiled language
that feels like a dynamically typed,
interpreted language.
http://golang.org/

I want to learn something which is really new and exciting, but not related to mobiles (iPhone, Android, iPad, Symbian).
How about something completely esoteric and not very useful, such as a Turing tarpit language like brainf**k?

Have a look at nodejs!
http://nodejs.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodejs

If you want to explore some new stuff but still be close to java, start learning Scala. It's a great JVM-based language, almost as fast as java, but with tons of new features. It mixes object-oriented and functional programming. Functional programming is gaining more popularity now, because of scalability and concurrency, so it's better to stay close to it. You can also learn about concurrency in a more natural way with Scala.
If you want to go into web-development, Ruby and Rails is a good choice.

Learn D, and if you really like it, help make the compiler better! D has practically every single feature you can think of, and then some (you can read about it on the website, I won't list things here), and it's much more powerful than C++ in some ways (it certainly isn't less powerful in any way except--maybe--for the lack of multiple inheritance, which I personally don't like anyway). The only thing it really lacks right now is a good, bug-free compiler, but for the most part it's just purely amazing. Just look at its features and you'll see. :)

jQuery, what about platforms such as AJAX and MVC? Kind of depends on what you already know and which platforms you're targeting.

I find visual material much more appealing to learn from, like video tutorials, etc. But theres tons of stuff, like reading tons of blogs, or if u dont have the time, download the pod cast so you listen on your way work (which what I sometimes do).
Basically you have to be displined in making time to learn, and you will always be on top of most things.
Sk8tz

Choices: Migrating from Classic ASP to .NET or Migrate to Open-Source Platform

My organization has a lot of legacy ASP software on its hands.
Since our perception is that Microsoft has shown a distinct lack of support for its older products, we need to figure out what to migrate to next.
If we migrate to ASP.NET from Classic ASP, It feels like that'd be a 'complete rewrite' "migration". Since that is probably the case, we're thinking about turning to a free (as in beer and as in speech) platform. I particularly think our investment (in programming effort, I mean) would be better spent with a platform that will let us evolve, rather than forcing us to dump very single line of code every 4 / 5 years. This is the main argument we've been using to advocate moving towards a 'free' platform.
Currently we're thinking about using a mixture of Java with a dynamic language like JRuby or Groovy.
My questions are: What would be a good migration choice? Are our fears unfounded? Would we (conceivably) need to rewrite a large portion of the codebase after 4 or 5 years anyway? What arguments do you have for moving to either .NET or to a free platform?

We recently migrated a substantial ASP project to ASP.NET and it's definitely possible to do a migration that doesn't become a complete rewrite, preserving a susbstantial proportion of the original code (although we benefited from some fairly well architected code with good separation between the business logic and the presentation layers from the outset).
We looked at two possible routes to the migration:
A ground-up rewrite as a 'proper' ASP.NET application making the most of the built-in controls and shifting all of the business and data access layers into classes etc - ie the way we approach a new ASP.NET project.
A more basic syntactic migration, taking the ASP pages and changing them over to ASP.NET without making too many up-front changes to the structure or logic. Then building on that as we continue to develop the site by making better use of ASP.NET controls, separate classes etc for new and revised functionality.
Due to schedule pressures, we adopted the second route, allowing us to make the switch sooner rather than later and then take a longer-term view on more fundamental changes as part of future developments.
On that basis, for the initial migration we were able to re-use the majority of the existing code, although this is gradually being replaced as we go forward. With an 'average' page having, say, 50-200 lines of HTML and 50-500 lines of VBScript code (as separate functions, not mixed into the HTML spaghetti-style), we found it took about an hour per page to migrate them, including changing all of the ADO data access to a new ADO.NET data access layer. Some simple pages took just a few minutes - some of the more complex pages took a whole day - but about an hour a page was the overall figure across hundreds of pages, with the time to change the data access representing a significant part of the effort.
If we were to redo the migration today, we'd use ASP.NET MVC rather than web forms as it maps better to the way that the original pages were written - although I couldn't comment on whether or not a migration to MVC would take more or less time.
This doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether or not you want to move to a free platform or change languages - you might have other reasons for wanting to do this. (Our client was Windows based so moving to ASP.NET, development time aside, carried no additional costs.) However, I can say that it's possible to migrate a substantial ASP site to ASP.NET without a complete rewrite - and it's equally possible to migrate from earlier versions of ASP.NET to more recent versions with minimal work. Obviously the route that we chose, preserving some of the ASP feel to the code rather than opting for a complete redevelopment, might not suit everyone - but it does give you a low impact entry point into ASP.NET that then allows you to build on that groundwork while making the most of your existing codebase and skills.

You know mono exists right?
I think you'll find that the longevity of a language is not as important as you think it is, since the lifetime of the major versions of an app is really quite likely to be less than that of most languages. And to be fair to .NET 2.0 -> 3.0 is a pretty small shift up, not a "dumping every single line of code" exercise. If you even wanted to shift up, which isn't really required yet.
I think a strong case could be made for any given platform you might consider, I'd look at other factors like your programmers comfort/skills/familiarity, community support, extensions, and fitness for purpose.

The choice lies in your company's ability to support whatever you choose.
Are you going to support the code yourselves? If so, what is your skill set base right now?
If you are currently enjoying ASP, ASP.NET (code rewrite or no) seems like the first idea to try, even if you don't realise it, by having used ASP thus far, you have probably acquired a great deal of knowledge in maintaining IIS, as well as the plethora of Microsoft based Services and Servers that you can reuse or at least easily adapt to, in ASP.NET development, deployment and support.
JAVA, RUBY, Whatever you choose, the beauty/usefulness/power/usability/durability of any technology lies on the people behind its maintenance.
The questions you should be making are:
best directed at your team
who will be developing, planning managing the resulting app/service?
Are you Ruby people? If not, do you want to be?
Are you JAVA people? same as above
are you....?
..and so on..
Don't distract yourselves with costs here and there or free versus non free.
when the technology is unknown/new to the people behind a project, man hours in support can be much more expensive than most packaged software solutions out there, which will then provide you with support.
This is also true for development environments where you have to pay more for the IDE/Server/etc, but on the bottom line you have less of a learning curve to go through and support at your level of expertise.
Besides: just like #annakata said, you have plenty of opportunities/projects to implement "free as in beer" ASP.NET functionality.. mono or not..
Example: you can set up ASP.NET service with Apache if you like that sort of thing..
Choose what technology you want to adopt by what you know and what you want to know, not what you think is the latest and greatest in buzz, specially if the whole reason why you even started thinking about rebuilding your code set is due to the lack of support for ASP from Microsoft.

I don't think you can escape the pain of migrating every 4-5 years given that the industry is in a continuous flux and tools, platforms and languages evolve to maximize efficiency. There's no guarantee that Groovy/Ruby/C# won't change to adopt the next big thing.
Personally I wouldn't lose sleep trying to 100% future proof myself. If that is the goal then you might as well use assembly and even then there's no guarantee that'll stay constant either.
Just consider the following
1) What do your guys know? If they are vb guys it makes sense to move to VB.NET
2) What budget do you have for tools?
3) Does the platform you want to move to have the stuff that you need? I remember some time back discovering with amazement Powerbuilder's support (or lack thereof) for regular expressions
4) Is there a community around the platform?

Why would you choose the Java programming language over others? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
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.

For a typical Web 2.0 Social Application - Java vs C#

For a product in long run (may be 0.5-1 million users) is it good to use java instead of .net from the cost/profitability perspective. To elaborate more..consider web farm scenario in which one will have to purchase windows + Sql server + some antivirus licenses for .net applications. But for java it's almost free. What points should I consider?
PS: I am a .net person by heart

I would expect bandwidth to cost more than software licences is you're reasonably successful - although obviously that will depend somewhat on the kind of app, and I haven't run any figures.
Are you just starting this up yourself, with little firm idea that it will take off? If so, I suggest you go with whatever makes your life easier to start with. If things take off, you'll either have enough money to pay for the licences easily, or you'll quite possibly need to rewrite the app anyway. Writing an app which provably scales to a million users is likely to cause you a lot more grief than writing one which scales to 10,000. Get the app out there early, get feedback ASAP, and you can do what it takes if it ever becomes truly successful.

Go with what you know. With that many users price may not be important.

The first thing you should consider is the fact that you are a .net person. Java syntax is very similar, but it will take you time to learn (more importantly, become good enough to write an app this large) in a language you don't know as well. You should consider whether the savings are worth that time to you.
Also, keep in mind that there are many (legal) ways to get cheap (sometimes free) copies of the Microsoft software that you need, or the "lite" versions of the software that you need... which may be enough to get you going until your venture starts making money. So explore those before making a decision too.

License fee's cost less than a weeks pay for a development team.
Go with what you will be most productive in, and you'll save money.
Btw, WebSphere costs $1600 per CPU...Java isn't always free.

If you're a .net person, then stay with c#.net.

Whenever this topic comes up, I'm reminded of the part of yahoo that used to be written in lisp, and used lisp very effectively in its design.
http://www.algo.be/cl/TEE-lisp/3212824097309629/index.htm
Like others have said, it doesn't matter much what platform you choose, as long as you can use that platform well.

If you're talking about purely buying hardware it depends. You could run a Java web app for simply the cost of the machines if you decide to use open source software. However you could go with Oracle as your database and Weblogic as your App Server and then pay for it.
But most importantly, you say yourself you're a .net guy - so you'd have to have the intangible cost of however long it would take you to get to the point where you actually know what you are doing with Java. The syntax is very close, sure, but you have to learn which Java frameworks you want to use, which APIs you want to use, how to deploy to whatever App Server you choose, etc.
Joel wrote about this in Language Wars
How do you decide between C#, Java, PHP, and Python? The only real difference is which one you know better. If you have a serious Java guru on your team who has build several large systems successfully with Java, you're going to be a hell of a lot more successful with Java than with C#, not because Java is a better language (it's not, but the differences are too minor to matter) but because he knows it better. Etc.