tech news – Page 241 – Kev's Development Toolbox

March 16, 2005

Is Java the new Cobol?

Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML, recently listed everything in the industry that he considers boring or not boring in his blog.

His point being that good news is often boring; it’s not exciting as bad news, and good news is often about things that are safe and predictable.

Java, in his opinion, has become boring. It’s reached a stage in it’s development where it is now accepted in many different application development areas (financial, telecoms, healthcare, etc) as a good, stable, reliable platform on which to build applications – Java has become the new Cobol.

This is an interesting perspective, but one that is great for everyone currently working with Java – it is truly mainstream and acceptable, and is no longer considered a risk. Companies are building multimillion dollar systems using Java, and it is accepted as a viable platform for building solutions.

All good things usually come to an end however. I don’t see that end as being .NET – Java has too much industry momentum to be overtaken or replaced by .NET. I see the main changes coming as a shift in development technology, possibly with AOP. Just as assembly was superceeded by high level languages, I think OO languages such as Java are going to not be replaced, but eveolve into more AOP like development languages. Java of course already has interest in these areas with Spring AOP, JBoss AOP, and AspectJ.

March 14, 2005

Versant slam Hibernate – Gavin King responds

Gavin King has recently posted to the Hibernate blog wesite with a set of responses to issues raised by Versant comparing their ORM product to the (apparently inferior) features Hibernate.

Gavin replies to each of the points raised by Versant, correcting their understanding and illustrating how Hibernate does indeed provide features indentified by Versant as missing.

I haven’t seen the original email from Versant, but it seems like an attempt to spread some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the ORM world. I wonder how much Versant’s business is hurting as a recent of the success of Hibernate?

March 11, 2005

Article on using annotation for data constraints

There’s an interesting article on the Sun Java site this week about how to use 1.5 Annotations to enforce data constraints on Java Beans. This is a very neat approach to enforcing rules like max lengths on bean properties.

March 10, 2005

.NET author and Dr Dobbs columnist slams .NET’s goals and future

Richard Grimes, author of Developing Applications with Visual Studio .NET (Addison-Wesley, 2002), and regular .NET columnist in Dr Dobbs software development magazine, has recently decided to call it quits on his .NET column in the magazine, as he is disallusioned with the goals for .NET and it’s future.

In his parting article in his column he critizes Microsoft for releasing .NET too early, and for allowing the size of the framework to become overwhelming. He also critizes Microsoft for releasing a framework which he believes it’s purpose was more marketing than technical, to prolong the current use and encourage future use and development with the aging VB language.

This is a major stab in the back for Microsoft but it makes plenty of sense. Along the same lines, to cater for those VB and C++ MFC developers who were feeling tempted to check out the good things happening in the Java development world, Microsoft introduce their own Virtual Machine, the Common Language Runtime, and offer existing MS developers the promise that it doesn’t matter what language you develop with, you can use them all! Wow – what a marketing promise that is – remove the complexities and political barriers of selecting a language for a development project and allow a choice. Plus, and I think this is the ultimate marketing ploy, offer a new language, which has all the language syntax and features of Java, just slightly modified, and call it a different name, C#.

Grimes thinks that Microsoft is losing faith in it’s own marketing promises of .NET. Longhorn, the next major version of Windows was supposed to be based on the technological promises of .NET. However, major new features of the new platform are now either being stripped out completely (WinFS – the new file storage system to replace the DOS based legacy system will all still use today, including NTFS, which was pilfered from OS/2’s HPFS anyway), or are being extracted from the Longhorn release so they can be released earlier to offer to existing Windows’s users to keep the user base happy. Grimes main point is that Microsoft, as if we didn’t know it already, is more concerned with marketing, sales and market share than it is with technological innovation. The radical new changes (WinFS especially) that were to be part of the next new Windows are all dropping by the wayside in favor of sales and release dates. Anyway, when was the last time Microsoft was an innovator in anything? Why innovate if you can buy and plagiarize technologies from your competitors instead?