Oracle and the fall of Java EE

Sure, technology changes. I this case it is positive, moving away from monolithic bags of tricks to lighter services. That is all good for Java. But, we will be looking to moving away because Oracle can no longer be trusted.

Re: Oracle and the fall of Java EE

#5

Post by dozzie » Fri, Jul 08, 2016, 12:05 PM UTC

mianos wrote: post #4

Sure, technology changes. I this case it is positive, moving away from monolithic bags of tricks to lighter services. That is all good for Java. But, we will be looking to moving away because Oracle can no longer be trusted.

To monolithic, interdependent bag of lighter tricks. Microservices don't magically make developers know how to design.

Re: Oracle and the fall of Java EE

#6

Post by douche » Fri, Jul 08, 2016, 12:12 PM UTC

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #3

I may wrong you, but I won't click on a link to "techsticles"

It's not Jamie Zawinski, so I assure you, you won't end up seeing an actual "techsticle"

Re: Oracle and the fall of Java EE

#7

Post by mianos » Fri, Jul 08, 2016, 12:17 PM UTC

dozzie wrote: post #5

mianos wrote: post #4

Sure, technology changes. I this case it is positive, moving away from monolithic bags of tricks to lighter services. That is all good for Java. But, we will be looking to moving away because Oracle can no longer be trusted.

To monolithic, interdependent bag of lighter tricks. Microservices don't magically make developers know how to design.

Agree, it makes things harder to design and much harder to debug. The win is down the track.

Re: Oracle and the fall of Java EE

#8

Post by itaysk » Fri, Jul 08, 2016, 12:22 PM UTC

Java always had an awesome open source community around it that produced frameworks, libraries and tools that inspired many other communities. but at it's core, Oracle was and still is the exact opposite of open (JVM, J2EE as examples). That makes me wander why Java was always considered the icon of open source.

Re: Oracle and the fall of Java EE

#9

Post by StevePerkins » Fri, Jul 08, 2016, 12:34 PM UTC

Amen. Be it Hacker News, or the /r/java subreddit, or wherever, it feels like the bulk of Java chatter revolves around...

1. Security vulnerabilities

2. The Ask.com toolbar

3. Oracle abandoning Java EE

... which is extremely frustrating because...

1. Virtually all of the "security vulnerabilities" deal with the browser plugin for using applets, which hasn't been widely used in 15 years

2. The toolbar malware, while stupid beyond measure, only applies to the consumer Java installer, which nobody installs anymore due to item #1 above.

3. Java EE is legacy tech. While deeply entrenched, most of the work out there for it today consists of maintenance or migration to more service-friendly approaches like Spring or Dropwizard.

Java is certainly not perfect. It's also long in the tooth, and is associated with "the enterprise", and so it's not seen as "sexy" by young developers. But for business software, large-scale data processing, and web/REST backends, I've yet to find anything on the horizon that seriously competes with it.

Every year I get bored and go exploring a new alternative language in side projects. Every year I come back, more appreciative of what I have. Python/Ruby/Node have their beginner-friendly charms, but are limited by the lack of type checking and/or chaotic ecosystems. Golang seems really promising, but has a long way to go. C# seems like the most credible challenger for business systems, but the .NET Core ecosystem is probably still years away from being where Java was in 2005.

I don't mind discussing Java's shortcomings. But I'm tired of hearing about irrelevant shortcomings such as applets and Java EE. Because that's just a way to keep a "language war" going without having to point at a serious alternative.

Re: Oracle and the fall of Java EE

#10

Post by StevePerkins » Fri, Jul 08, 2016, 12:41 PM UTC

itaysk wrote: post #8

Java always had an awesome open source community around it that produced frameworks, libraries and tools that inspired many other communities. but at it's core, Oracle was and still is the exact opposite of open (JVM, J2EE as examples). That makes me wander why Java was always considered the icon of open source.

I would argue that Java's success owes more to Maven Central that it does to anything Sun or Oracle did with the language itself.

Maven Central is Java's CPAN, and that's what you need in order to build a thriving open source ecosystem.