This is more about PayPal's dirty laundry than an comparative evaluation of technologies. If a collective set of tools are used improperly, comparisons beyond the context of those walls means very little.
About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
81–90 of 216 posts
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#82TL;DR:
* Micro-benchmarks don't provide a good picture of real system performance and can be skewed to make almost anything look better/worse than anything else.
* Much of Java's "slowness," clunkiness, large amounts of boilerplate code, etc. is the fault of the Java ecosystem and libraries rather than the language itself or the JVM.
* The inverse is true for Node: the quality of its ecosystem helps make up for language and runtime shortcomings.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. JAX-RS (the standard implemented by Jersey), which is part of the often maligned Java EE, is a (surprisingly?) well designed REST "microframework". Java EE in general has come a long way from the monster it used to be, and is becoming quite pleasant.
You can use Servlet + Jersey. It's just one dependency away and minimal web.xml config (or spring-jersey...whichever). It's not necessarily tied to Java EE albeit Java EE app-server _must_ implement JAX-RS properly.
Both Servlet and JAX-RS are pretty central pieces of Java EE. But Java EE is now really a collection of modules that you can pick and choose.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why not scala? Scala 8 years ago is where java 8 is now, and you can ignore most of the java frameworks.
Even putting aside my great dislike for Scala (which I discussed on HN ad nauseam :)), I think everyone would agree that Scala has a very different philosophy from Java. Java has been designed as a "blue-collar" language, with maintenance of a large project with possibly hundreds of developers as a central guiding principle. C#, Go, Dart, Kotlin, Fantom etc., have a similar philosophy. But Scala is a different beast…
I wouldn't say that Java is extremely popular by any stretch. It's ubiquitous, but people aren't falling over themselves to become Java programmers anymore. I'd say Java is much less popular than it used to be (and I've run a Java Users' Group for 13 years). The JVM is still popular, but Java the language's popularity is arguably at a low point.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#85I fantasize about rebuilding the java ecosystem. Create "JPM", don't allow anything from the old Maven system in it. Create a new "hip" minimalist framework that ignores everything about java and its notions of OOP. Basic dependency management handled NPM-style. Developers encourage to put everything in the same package for their own stuff, and everything is package level. Getters and setters and encapsulation and ja…
You've basically described C#: Getters, setters fixed? Check. Functional features? Check. Most crappy OO features fixed? Check. Trendy package system inspired by npm/apt-get/gems? Check. Healthy community with libraries replacing frameworks? Check. I'd recommend checking it out if you haven't already.
And C# "fixes" the deficiencies by heaping features upon features. Already it looks like the MS version of Perl.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#86This reads like someone reading a 1995 article about a company switching from writing Netscape Enterprise Server code in C++ on a Windows machine to Apache code in perl on a Sun server, and then writing a defense of the x86 processor against SPARC.
I might have missed something but I don't recall the original PayPal article arguing that the switch was motivated by moving from a slow virtual machine to a faster one.
But just as switching from C++ to perl would trade some computing power for productivity in getting a site built, I don't see it as controversial for an organization to say they achieved the same productivity gains going from java to javascript.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#87I fantasize about rebuilding the java ecosystem. Create "JPM", don't allow anything from the old Maven system in it. Create a new "hip" minimalist framework that ignores everything about java and its notions of OOP. Basic dependency management handled NPM-style. Developers encourage to put everything in the same package for their own stuff, and everything is package level. Getters and setters and encapsulation and ja…
"All "JPM" packages expected to be under 100 lines, a la NPM. Frameworks are discouraged. Take what you need a la carte." LOL, I'm trying to imagine anything else in life being run like this. For instance, you go to the "car package manager" and are told that all parts must be less than 2kg and that you need to choose which ones you need...
I think your analogy makes a whole lot more sense when you keep in mind that you'd be a automotive engineer and not a consumer.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "libraries over frameworks" notion is something I keep noticing in communities that seem to be more engineering-minded than rock-star-ninja-dev-minded. Where do you think this comes from? I think it's a mix of maturity on the part of the community members along with how often the language is used to do things that are harder than CRUD.
I'd say it's exactly about "maturity" not in the emotional sense, but the "breadth and depth of professional experience" sense. A lot of the 'glamour' in the Bay Area is around web apps that 20-somethings use. As a consequence a lot of the headlines and centers of discussion are going to be around languages, platforms and paradigms that reflect that. And, these days, that would be dynamically typed languages, framewo…
Except that of all the things you've named, dynamically typed languages are hardly "a fad". It's surprising (?), though, that the lousy ones are the most popular ones.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#89> Spring brings a lot of functionality to the table. Likely far too much functionality. Most people are moving away from the monolithic application and moving towards smaller more lightweight frameworks… It's high time to debunk Spring. In the name of 'Dependency Injection' many Java developers still create complex, monolithic and - first of all - untestable applications with this framework. In fact, Spring adds anot…
I'm pretty good with Spring and have even given trainings on it and I'd argue that Spring's main problem is that it needs to be seen in the right context: a poor man's DSL for declarative system configuration (it is last 10 years old after all.)
That it creates untestable applications seems like completely nonsensical FUD however since the entire point of Spring is to keep code easily testable. Spring is an almost direct response to the lack of testability of the ServiceLocator anti-pattern.
I'm not saying you can't make untestable code in Spring, but if you do the problem is most likely more with the people than with Spring.
Re: About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say it's exactly about "maturity" not in the emotional sense, but the "breadth and depth of professional experience" sense. A lot of the 'glamour' in the Bay Area is around web apps that 20-somethings use. As a consequence a lot of the headlines and centers of discussion are going to be around languages, platforms and paradigms that reflect that. And, these days, that would be dynamically typed languages, framewo…
Except that of all the things you've named, dynamically typed languages are hardly "a fad". It's surprising (?), though, that the lousy ones are the most popular ones.
I take a very cynical view of these things, and from that perspective it doesn't surprise me at all, really. My cynical view is that the "lousy" ones are popular because they are easy even for non-technical people to learn well enough to be useful in the majority of business settings.
This sets up a kind of feedback loop: there is an abundant supply of "cheap" labor who can use these languages, which companies love, and so they create more jobs for this labor market to fill, which means more people want to fill it (since there are jobs there).
Edit: 1) I would disagree that python is a "lousy" language; 2) To give some perspective regarding where I come from, the vast majority of my experience is with statically typed languages like C, C++ and Java; I prefer them and in my experience they are at least as easy to develop with as any of the dynamic languages that are popular.