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Greatest Java apps

blogs.oracle.com

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Re: Greatest Java apps

#161

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

pron wrote: post #143
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if I’d celebrate Spring... and Oracle would rather Android use “real” Java, not Dalvik. The JVM was nice at the time, but I feel that languages like Scalia and Kotlin exist because Java was too conservative - and many of Kotlin’s great features had to be implemented using hacks and tricks to work-around the JVM’s now-primitive type-system. Also note that Kotlin can now target other platforms besides the…

That other popular Java-platform languages exist indeed shows that the Java language is too conservative for some , but that 90% use the Java language shows that its design is in line with what most people want. And the CLR is about, oh, ten-fifteen years behind OpenJDK in compilation, GC and low-overhead deep profiling and observability. OpenJDK's C2 compiler is pretty much on par with clang in terms of optimisation…

I know the CLR’s runtime performance has room for improvement- but I’m referring to the CLR’s capabilities and “language-enabling”-feature-set.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#162

Post by gonzo41 »

tyingq wrote: post #46
dreamcompiler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG. I've set up Confluence servers and Tomcat was the most nightmarish part of that experience. The idea that Tomcat was an actual improvement on something sends shudders up my spine.

You would have had to lived through a full blown J2EE app on Websphere/Weblogic/JBoss to appreciate it.

Im still in the jboss world. Though we've solved the problem, we just don't ever deploy more than 1 app to a jboss app server. I'm very much ringing the spring bell around my work. but the cutover of all our legacy stuff that is running fine will be decades.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#163

Post by rtpg »

smabie wrote: post #155
the_arun wrote: post #84

To this list we could also add Cassandra, ANTLR, Spring Framework, JUnit, Jetty, Tomcat, Android etc. The list continues. The beauty of Java is not Java/Programming language - but JVM. It inspired people to make other languages such as Scala or Kotlin.

Yeah, but is the JVM worth it? It seems like VMs are now out of style, after decades of trying to make them performant at the cost of staggering complexity. VMs are still not more performant than native code and with the advent of SaaS, portability isn't a big issue anymore. I don't think anyone doubts that the JVM is an astounding and amazing piece of tech. But what is in doubt is whether we need such a thing in the…

This industry isn't a monolith, you have Javascript still chugging along, things like Lua as well. Microsft has the CLR as well.

Of course some stuff is conflating the language and the VM (which gets you to things like asm.js) but I think people acknowledge the value of what the JVM provides even in projects you cite (Zig has a whole thing about cross-compilation, for example).

And honestly? targetting a VM is _way easier_ than targetting native code generation. Perf-wise it might suck to try and then engineer good performance out of it (though you can get shared improvements with things like the JVM), but "staggering complexity" feels like a misqualification for something that got us a lot further down the "write once run everywhere" path than C ended up doing.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#164

Post by bobthepanda »

nonbirithm wrote: post #150
nineteen999 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just so happened that by choosing the JVM they gave the ability to the community to decompile the game and add the content they want That wasn't their intention; Minecraft code was originally obfuscated specifically in order to combat reverse engineering and modification. https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/mpslv/why_are_mi... https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Obfuscation_map

True, but I find it amusing that none of that even mattered and the community was persistent enough to build an entire architecture, database and IRC bot solely for deobfuscating the source of Minecraft anyways. So long as nobody would get sued for it, it was still possible from a technical standpoint, so the motivated people did it anyways. And now it seems that Twitch and other "official" entities have conceded to…

> That, and the playerbase being motivated enough to keep developing content for them.

This by far is the most important thing. You could have a beautiful open source game but if no one knows about it or wants to play it, it's less than useful.

Some of the biggest modding communities I am aware of came from closed-source games; the Sims has always had strong, years-long modding lifetimes, and SimCity 4 and Cities Skylines after it had total overhaul mods that changed entire game systems, as well as thriving communities of less ambitious mods.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#165

Post by recursive »

bzb3 wrote: post #75
the_af wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's highly debatable, not a point of fact. And the rest of the apps from the article? Are they also successful "despite Java"? At which point are you willing to admit that maybe Java was suitable for general purpose programming? Which amount of evidence would convince you?

What's debatable, that the Java version of Minecraft had terrible performance or that the console ports are not written in Java? About your other question: I only mentioned Minecraft.

The point that's debatable is the point you led with, that Minecraft "had" to be re-written because of poor performance.

Not that it was.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#166

Post by victor106 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #138
the_arun wrote: post #84

To this list we could also add Cassandra, ANTLR, Spring Framework, JUnit, Jetty, Tomcat, Android etc. The list continues. The beauty of Java is not Java/Programming language - but JVM. It inspired people to make other languages such as Scala or Kotlin.

I don’t know if I’d celebrate Spring... and Oracle would rather Android use “real” Java, not Dalvik. The JVM was nice at the time, but I feel that languages like Scalia and Kotlin exist because Java was too conservative - and many of Kotlin’s great features had to be implemented using hacks and tricks to work-around the JVM’s now-primitive type-system. Also note that Kotlin can now target other platforms besides the…

>I don’t know if I’d celebrate Spring

I've used SpringBoot recently on several projects after being in the Rails and Django and PHP world for a long time and I must say its super great.

I never could have imagined that I would praise a web framework based on Java 5 years ago.

Its lightweight, super fast (compared to Rails or Django), mature (its been around more that 15 years) and very stable.

It also supports Kotlin development

The more I learn about the Spring eco system the more I am suprised by how much stuff it covers everything from Spring Security to Spring Batch to Spring Reactive to Spring Cloud Task. Its mind blowing how much ground it covers.

Also, I hear the latest version will support Graal VM making start up times equivalent to native.

I strongly suggest spending time with it for those interested.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#168

Post by smabie »

rtpg wrote: post #163
smabie wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but is the JVM worth it? It seems like VMs are now out of style, after decades of trying to make them performant at the cost of staggering complexity. VMs are still not more performant than native code and with the advent of SaaS, portability isn't a big issue anymore. I don't think anyone doubts that the JVM is an astounding and amazing piece of tech. But what is in doubt is whether we need such a thing in the…

This industry isn't a monolith, you have Javascript still chugging along, things like Lua as well. Microsft has the CLR as well. Of course some stuff is conflating the language and the VM (which gets you to things like asm.js) but I think people acknowledge the value of what the JVM provides even in projects you cite (Zig has a whole thing about cross-compilation, for example). And honestly? targetting a VM is _way e…

I would say that writing a rudimentary VM is about as hard as generating LLVM IR. The difference is that the VM will have terrible performance and the LLVM IR will have pretty good performance.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#169

Post by mark_l_watson »

I was surprised how much I enjoyed reading that, in a memory lane sort of way.

I haven’t used Java in a long while and I haven’t updated my book “Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Java” in many years. I decided to rewrite rather than stop distributing the book. I started the rewrite about three weeks ago. First step was tossing out about 1/3 of the material, stressing machine learning, adding probabilistic programming, and updating the semantic web material.

After taking a whole day getting my head back into coding in Java, I am actually enjoying it. I still like Common Lisp and Haskell a lot more.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#170

Post by donmcronald »

gschrader wrote: post #116
donmcronald wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up on Java when Oracle prematurely rolled JavaFX into the JDK and got rid of the dedicated bug tracker. I was using JavaFX a lot and frequently ran into bugs. I didn't mind the bugs because I thought the tech had a ton of potential, the JavaFX developers were really good, and it was easy to get things fixed. However, as soon as they rolled JavaFX into the JDK I knew it would be a nightmare for me. Without auth…

Do you now realize that it's been split out of the JDK again? https://github.com/openjdk/jfx

Yeah, I still check on it every once in a while and I updated a small app to JDK11, but the industry has changed a lot since then. I know Java is still huge, but IMO that's in spite of Oracle, not because of them. The proverbial ship has sailed for me. If Oracle told me the sky is blue, I'd be looking up to verify it.

I completely gave up on JavaFX the day Microsoft bought Xamarin. My impression at the time was that Oracle just didn't care about JavaFX and barely supported their own developers. AFAIK they never did anything to encourage 3rd party developers even though there was some really cool stuff. Ex: Microsoft ended up owning RoboVM.

I also remember being frustrated the first time I looked at the JavaFX repo myself and saw how few committers there were. All the while Oracle would be simultaneously claiming they're investing in the tech, but actually dumping stuff [2] on the community. It's like they viewed open source as nothing more than a way to externalize costs for things they didn't want to maintain.

I never had the inside track on anything, so I don't know what the real story is, but my impression of it has always been that it was badly managed by someone higher up the chain than the people that managed JavaFX directly. Based on my experience everyone on the JavaFX team always made a ton of effort and tried foster a small but growing community.

Speaking of community, it was plagued with the same kind of doublespeak. Oracle would be on the mailing list telling everyone they wanted to work with the community [3] at the exact same time they were telling all of us to file our bugs using a plain text input box on bugs.java.com. How the hell do you submit a runnable test case using a single, 4 line high text box?

And if you need any kind of indicator to demonstrate Oracle's lack of ability to foster a developer community or provide developers with modern resources, go look at that bug filing system I keep complaining about. It's still the same awful system that looks like a holdover from the 90s.

This is all just my opinion, but I honestly believe Oracle squandered a huge opportunity with JavaFX.

1) https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8091544

2) http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-Janu...

3) http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-Dece...

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