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Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

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11–20 of 304 posts

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#11

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

It’s stable, mature, fast, and it is very easy and cheap to hire for, both domestic and offshore.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#12

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

It's trivial to find dirt-cheap java programmers domestically and in overseas sweatshops.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#13
post #6

Is there a reason to use Oracle's closed-source Java implementation instead of the opensource implementations? Asking as someone who's ignorant about Java. edit: per comments below, Oracle's Java is open-source too these days.

Licensing. Oracle requires a commercial license

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#14

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

Because Java is stable and mature, has well-understood performance, is statically-typed, has a proven track record when it comes to backwards compatibility, is reasonably fast and has lots of library and tooling support. Additionally lots of people know it.

Some complain about verbosity. It's really a non-issue particularly in a modern IDE and not worth making a language decision over.

Not everything has to be new and sexy.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#15
post #6

Is there a reason to use Oracle's closed-source Java implementation instead of the opensource implementations? Asking as someone who's ignorant about Java. edit: per comments below, Oracle's Java is open-source too these days.

Oracle's builds of Java are open source as well. The OpenJDK codebase is shared across all of the vendors that provide builds.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#16
post #8

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

I'll try: Java is a proven, boring and "easy" language without much surprise, with a big standard library and ecosystem.

Java is great, but here's a surprise:

    if (str1 == str2) {
       // oops
    }

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#18

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

Java developers are cheap and easy to find. There are libraries for everything that you would need - AWS SDK, Redis, etc. Performance is tolerable and can be improved with things like Micronaut and native ahead of time compilation (GraalVM).

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#19
post #6

Is there a reason to use Oracle's closed-source Java implementation instead of the opensource implementations? Asking as someone who's ignorant about Java. edit: per comments below, Oracle's Java is open-source too these days.

Oracle's builds of Java are open source as well. The OpenJDK codebase is shared across all of the vendors that provide builds.

"Open Source" but not free to use as you wish. The Oracle builds require a commercial license.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#20
post #6

Is there a reason to use Oracle's closed-source Java implementation instead of the opensource implementations? Asking as someone who's ignorant about Java. edit: per comments below, Oracle's Java is open-source too these days.

Oracle's builds of Java are open source as well. The OpenJDK codebase is shared across all of the vendors that provide builds.

Thanks! So why would I pick Oracle's implementation?
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