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Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

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Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#121

Post by IsTom »

lucian1900 wrote: post #85
fizx wrote: post #33

I've been hacking Rails since 2004, and I've made the switch to Java (dropwizard+mustache) for basic web development this year (sometimes with a meteor-like micro-framework I rolled myself). Benefits: - Higher quality code. Java is easier to refactor than Ruby, which makes up for the lower language power. - Performance! - Actual concurrency! - Faster server spinup and incremental changes. Rails with 20 gems in develo…

Is Rails that slow? There's absolutely nothing on my machine slower to start up that the jvm.

I'm not sure about slow (though probably it is slow), but it surely eats a lot of RAM. Lots and lots of RAM.

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#122

Post by sterwill »

irahul wrote: post #116
sterwill wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Java IDE also lets you move methods and fields, extract interfaces from concrete classes, push members up or down, find all references to a member (reliably), view inheritance relationships, and much more. And it can do all of those safely, warning you if you'll shadow another name. I wish I had that stuff in a Ruby IDE. I've used Eclipse for a long time, but not for JEE projects, and I don't see any "stop the w…

> Your Java IDE also lets you move methods and fields, extract interfaces from concrete classes, push members up or down, find all references to a member (reliably), view inheritance relationships, and much more. And it can do all of those safely, warning you if you'll shadow another name. I wish I had that stuff in a Ruby IDE. Some of it isn't applicable to Ruby, and some of it has to be done manually. True that you…

I'm usually in a 64-bit Linux VM (in VMware Workstation) on a 4 core i5 Xeon from about 3 years ago. 5 GB RAM total, Oracle Java 7 with -Xmx800M for Eclipse. My workspace includes 50 projects, most of them are Eclipse plug-ins themselves.

In my experience, if Eclipse "stops the world", Java is collecting garbage. Java 6 and 7 have become much better at doing incremental collection more often (maybe parallel is the default now?) and the result is a more responsive UI. To me, Eclipse itself feels snappier over time (each release from 3.3 to 3.7 has felt better on similar hardware).

Another thing I've noticed is that Eclipse is significantly faster cleaning/building large workspaces on Linux compared to Windows on the same hardware. I assume this is a result of Linux's aggressive filesystem caching.

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#123

Post by swah »

fizx wrote: post #33

I've been hacking Rails since 2004, and I've made the switch to Java (dropwizard+mustache) for basic web development this year (sometimes with a meteor-like micro-framework I rolled myself). Benefits: - Higher quality code. Java is easier to refactor than Ruby, which makes up for the lower language power. - Performance! - Actual concurrency! - Faster server spinup and incremental changes. Rails with 20 gems in develo…

I'm kinda testing the same setup. There are a couple nice things, but one thing that hurts me coming from Python is that in Python an SQL row was just an dict with data, and I could change my schema (and add/remove entries from this object) and then return it as JSON quite easily.

Now in Java/Dropwizard the tendency is to map from SQL rows to objects, then from objects to JSON. Which is a PITA, even more when your design/database changes too much. (The upside is that when you get some object, the data IS there).

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#124

Post by einhverfr »

latch wrote: post #39
mibbitier wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, it's due to lazy programmers who moan if they have to type or think too hard. Also very very much fashion lead by hipsters who must be using the newest coolest untested thing on the planet.

Laziness, Impatience and Hubris There's no advantage to the need to over-architect. It's purely a bi-product of Java (or static languages in general). Because you can figure out how to properly write a Java program doesn't make you clever, sorry. C/C++ programmers moaned about Java and garbage collectors the same way Java programmers are moaning about dynamic language.

Static languages have some advantages. It's not quite the same thing (Perl being dynamic and all) but I have gone towards Moose in Perl which gives some of the things I see as advantages of static languages (such as the ability to engineer in constraints declaratively, assuming those are enforced by the language. SQL is great this way.)

The real reason to use languages like C and C++ is performance. The reason for dynamic languages is rapid prototyping. Java is somewhere in the middle but not really ideal except for where you want to compile your software to run on an imaginary CPU which can be emulated everywhere :-)

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#125

Post by Silhouette »

mibbitier wrote: post #104
latch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last part of your comment is just language bias. symbols and hashes are fundamental to ruby. Why would I use string concatenation like my parent, when the language support string interpolation. It's as unclear to you as generics or annotations might be to someone who didn't know Java. Surely you see that? I think you are being pedantic about characters vs code. But, for what it's worth, I disagree. You are having…

I grew up reading assembly code listings. Being able to read code is a really really important skill IMHO. Something like Java is very very easy to read. It's mainly keyword based, rather than special character based. I'd much rather read a 1,000 line Java program, than a 100 line program. The other point I'd make is that Java is probably about as verbose as english is. But we all manage, using English. We don't moan…

The other point I'd make is that Java is probably about as verbose as english is. But we all manage, using English. We don't moan on and on that talking, writing, reading is so inefficient and we should all switch to something better.

You've made this argument in multiple posts now, so I'm just going to point out here that people doing science and engineering use formal, mathematical notations precisely because they do offer more precise and concise ways of expressing the necessary technical concepts.

There are plenty of reasons to criticise some of those notations with hindsight, but "not being English" is not among them.

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#126

Post by pi18n »

mibbitier wrote: post #104
latch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last part of your comment is just language bias. symbols and hashes are fundamental to ruby. Why would I use string concatenation like my parent, when the language support string interpolation. It's as unclear to you as generics or annotations might be to someone who didn't know Java. Surely you see that? I think you are being pedantic about characters vs code. But, for what it's worth, I disagree. You are having…

I grew up reading assembly code listings. Being able to read code is a really really important skill IMHO. Something like Java is very very easy to read. It's mainly keyword based, rather than special character based. I'd much rather read a 1,000 line Java program, than a 100 line program. The other point I'd make is that Java is probably about as verbose as english is. But we all manage, using English. We don't moan…

You'd much rather read a Java program because you are already biased towards it. Yes it's easy to read, but you need to acknowledge that many other skilled developers would find it easier to read Python, or Ruby, and indeed would rather read 1,000 lines of the same over 100 lines of Java. Otherwise you are simply being willfully ignorant.

Why is Java considered inefficient and English not? Maybe because we don't need to create a new class for every concept in English. Yours is a pretty poor analogy; English vocabulary is extensive but it is not inherently verbose.

Anyway I am only writing not to say you are wrong, but rather, since other people are arguing with you reasonably and you are dismissing them without consideration, your argumentation is wrong.

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#127

Post by Silhouette »

mibbitier wrote: post #107
latch wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP asked why Java isn't used for the web. One of the more popular Java web frameworks heavily relies on XML. It has nothing to do with Java, but it has everything to do with what the OP asked about.

Write your own framework. It's actually not rocket science. You can have a pretty good Java web server going in about 200 lines of code. Just write a simple HTTP server in Java, and have it work as you want it to. Without XML...

You can have a pretty good Java web server going in about 200 lines of code.

No, you can't.

Your "simple HTTP server" proposal is roughly on a par with suggesting that a web developer should design his own security protocols. The idea is simple enough, but there is a lot of subtlety involved in covering all the edges cases properly, and a lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time building, testing and maintaining good tools for these jobs. Why would you reinvent the wheel, with a flat edge across part of it, a single spoke connecting to the axel, and in only one size that won't be the one that fits under the arch next week anyway?

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#128

Post by pi18n »

gizmogwai wrote: post #68
latch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but you do realize that's a lot of code for something so simple, right? get '/hello/:name' do content_type :json {:content => "Hello, #{params[:name]}"}.to_json end

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but you do realize that your version is entirely static while the other one is ready for future evolutions? By changing a single line, the java version can also produce XML or text response. By changing two lines, it can also respond to POST requests. And that's just the top of the iceberg. Oh, and in the ends, it's way faster than Node, Ruby, Python and most of the dynamic la…

> By changing two lines, it can also respond to POST requests.

If you think this is a feature, you might actually like Sinatra/Ruby :)

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#129

Post by zootm »

latch wrote: post #52
fizx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're stuck in 2007. People doing modern java use: @Path("/hello") @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON) class HelloController { class Greeting { public Greeting(String name) { this.content = "Hello, " + name; } public final String content; } @GET public Greeting greet(@PathParam("name") String name) { return new Greeting(name); } } > curl http://localhost:8080/hello?name=me {"content": "Hello, me"}

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but you do realize that's a lot of code for something so simple, right? get '/hello/:name' do content_type :json {:content => "Hello, #{params[:name]}"}.to_json end

The sibling comments point out some good points about your general critique, but it's worth noting your code isn't really "equivalent"; almost everything you chopped was a datatype declaration, which isn't required in Java any more than in Ruby:

      @GET
      public Map greet(@PathParam("name") String name) {
        return singletonMap( "content", "Hello, " + name );
      }
I like both of these systems, and Java is undeniably the more verbose language, but this framework really isn't an egregious example of that.

Re: Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

#130

Post by latch »

einhverfr wrote: post #124
latch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laziness, Impatience and Hubris There's no advantage to the need to over-architect. It's purely a bi-product of Java (or static languages in general). Because you can figure out how to properly write a Java program doesn't make you clever, sorry. C/C++ programmers moaned about Java and garbage collectors the same way Java programmers are moaning about dynamic language.

Static languages have some advantages. It's not quite the same thing (Perl being dynamic and all) but I have gone towards Moose in Perl which gives some of the things I see as advantages of static languages (such as the ability to engineer in constraints declaratively, assuming those are enforced by the language. SQL is great this way.) The real reason to use languages like C and C++ is performance. The reason for dy…

I'm not saying they don't have their advantages. I want to be clear about that. But for most web apps, the limitations probably outnumber the benefits. Especially since the stateless nature of most web apps allow for easy horizontal scaling, thus negating the performance advantage.

As for performance, it really is amazing how fast node.js is. It's like a slow static language rather than a fast dynamic language (by that I mean, the gap between it and Java is smaller than the gab between it and Python). I don't know why that is, but I hope every dynamic language has that potential and that someone manages to unlock it.

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