You can always find poor developers using any technology. That they are certified simply indicates their ability to learn to pass a test--but it does indicate that at that point in time, they knew something about the technology, someting you cannot guarantee in someone who is not certified.

Pretenders abound in our field -- they code in all languages and are at all levels in all positions.

So--- DON'T BASH JAVA BECAUSE YOU RAN ACROSS A CERTIFIED PERSON WHO COULD NOT CODE WELL.

Ronald Newton
IBM Certified for e-business Solution Designer (ICeSD),
Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for Java Platform Enterprise Edition Technology (SCEA),
SCJD, SCJP
Author Java Certification Practice Test at www.boson.com

>>I have seen Sun Certified Engineers that couldn't code at all. I have seen programmers coming from other languages that picked up a book and ran with it. It is good programmers that create the benefit, not training courses
>>>
Strongly agree, I have met some of them. SCJP can't code well and C++ programmer catch-up very well. :)

It seems that no one thinks about the decompilation of Java class byte code from those decompilers? Is it also a good reason to stay with Java? I always expects Sun will put more effort on protecting the compiled source code...but also make me disappointed.

Thanks,
Raymond

One must pay attention to Java because it's ubiquitous. By now, it's like a force of nature, warts and all. Java was in the right place, at the right time, with the right (no charge, all expenses paid by Sun) sponsorship.

That says you'd better learn to live with it and use it. The fact that you've also got to learn a pile of constantly changing APIs and other programming languages and environments to get anything real done opens a fantastic $$$ opportunity for training companies and tools companies and consulting companies and ..... BECAUSE JAVA AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES ARE DIFFICULT TO USE.

In particular, Java was not designed for web services. It is a tribute to many tough, persistent people that any web services work gets done in Java.

You can see my favorite way to go at www.waterlanguage.org.

Wrong. ColdFusion MX file is compiled during first request and all requests will actually hit the servlet (same with JSP). And that servlet is running on Java Application Server, which is JRun (CFMXs underlying platform). ColdFusion only "translates" CFML (cold fusion markup language)to Java. You can write JSP and run it on ColdFusionMX server and result will be th same.
ColdFusionMX tags - are actually JSP "taglibs".
ColdFusion MX - IS JAVA.

The article certainly gave ten good reason for Java, but there's one more.
This eleventh reason is the on that keeps the guys at Microsoft awake at night. It's **Open Source**. A lot of the major Java innovations are being done as open source development. JBoss, Struts, Ant, Xdoclet, Hibernate, Jdom plus many, many more projects are now what's driving Java development.

I would go with 1 reason
1. It has been around and it has proven itself

Write once , run multiple places has been illusion since the beginning of time.

Java needs to have an easier coding interface with beginner(VB) like guys and the hardcore(Java is easy) guys. It doesn't so .Net steps in. Where is the 4GL for Java..3GL maybe? 2 GL? I am curious whether ColdFusion MX (easy to write) and generates high performance Java may be the ticket...

*************
With all due respect to Java, so far as I have seen it only has 2 reasons why it is better than .NET:

1. It has been around and it has proven itself...

2. It can be ran on multiple platform, once compiled.

take a look

Unfortunately, this article praises Java with some questionable reasons. Most of the arguments are pertinent, but 3 of them are really off the mark.
4 performance: Java sure has become a serious contender when it comes to computation (actually see my book about OO implementation of numerical methods). But, using JSP as an example is quite lousy. JSP do ***NOT*** deliver high performance systems. See for example, the recent book by Greg Barish about High performance Java applications. There are better ways of doing things than JSP as exposed in Jason Hunter

I have the same experience as Brian few years ago. But I still learn Java just in case it really picks up (with a lot of marketing, it did). I am also learning about .NET (same reason). Currently I am using a 4GL that comes with application framework - the most efficient tool for me for now. You will never know what comes next...

"Developers without proper training often see no benefit from Java."

- that's cute. You think a 5 day or even 2-week company sponsored course with a corporate training company will fix that?

I have seen Sun Certified Engineers that couldn't code at all. I have seen programmers coming from other languages that picked up a book and ran with it. It is good programmers that create the benefit, not training courses.

> Try loading up your WSAD application
> in JDeveloper and see if it's "vendor
> independent."

What kind of statement is that? Obviously the source code is vendor independent, not the project file. Copy your code package hierarchy in Eclipse, see if that works.

If you use a tool that doesn't keep the source code as a Java file, I don't know who's fault is that? The company who opted for using using that tool or the tool itself?

I am a long time entrepreneur, and I use Java and Microsoft (primarily Visual Basic) every week.

A lot of good points in this thread. IMHO, I think it all comes down to your objectives.

If you run a large development group and are more interested in corraling all developers into one well defined sandbox in which they develop all applications, then .Net is clearly the platform of choice. If on the other hand, you are doing innovative work in which you need to think (and code) outside of the box in order to be successful, then Java is a far more empowering environment.

Microsoft, for sound business reasons, is after the huge mainstream IT market of large corporations, standard SQL based applications, etc. So they produce an architecture and a development environment that highly optimizes any development in this well defined technology sandbox.

If on the other hand, you need to do something leading edge or revolutionary, then you are very restricted on Microsoft technology. Case in point; write a almost any control in Visual C++ and you'll see what I mean. In this environment, Visual C++ is virtually a "write only" language.

From a business perspective, if it is a desktop application, the odds are about 99 to 1 in Microsoft's favor, so I'd choose that option. If your application is web based and its value is mainly in the business process that is encapsulated in standard screens and standard (albeit complex) SQL database relationships, then .Net is great. But if your application is outside of that model, then I would go for the clean, extremely well engineered (from a computer science point of view) Java as the best "enabling" tool.

And finally, if you are a starving startup: Microsoft MDSN subscription=$$, Windows Server 2003 to deploy on=$$, SQL Server licenses=$$, web hosting costs using SQL Server=+$$, etc. Java when combined with the totally industrial open source software available: virtually all of that is free. Need an additional box? Buy a server for a thousand or so and you are off and running; no more licensing costs.

In closing: if you will have 1000 mediocre programmers on the project: .Net. If you will have 5-10 above average programmers on the project: Java.

Different strokes for different folks.

I pretty much agree with the article, but I think it's amusing to click on one of the links and see that "Java Developer's Journal" is running on Cold Fusion. Guess you don't want to be 10 times faster?

"I say minimal because, well, when is the last time you ever saw two competing vendors have the EXACT same configuration layout for their competing apps? You haven't! Therefore, ever vendor has their own way of having things deployed."

Exactly! It's not really "vendor independent." But I guess it sounds good. I don't have a problem with this, but I get tired of hearing people spout off about how vendor independent Java is.

No, I'm not using a PII. However, it's obvious the performance is not the wonderful utopia that the writer believes. It's slow, even on my 1.4ghz with 1gb of ram. It's usable, but saying Swing is "high-performance" is a bit of a stretch, don't you think? In any event, I'm going to assume he wasn't talking about Java as a whole, but rather J2EE, which is pretty quick overall.

As to the article, I agree for the most part, and I too like what .NET has to offer. I am a little unclear how you figure Java/JSP is 10x faster than cold fusion? I don't even know cold fusion, some of our other co workers do. But I am curious what tests were ran to show that it is 10x faster?

As for some replies. Brian Kiser writes:
"Java is high performance? You are obviously not talking about desktop apps using Swing."

Brian, what are you running on, a PII? Sure, a native app will usually run faster, but shouldn't it? Even so, to this day on my PIII800 with 512MB RAM I am seeing NO problem with several java apps. As an example, I give you Eclipse IDE. Yes, the widget set was done through JNI to the native OS, but it is still using JNI, which in itself is somewhat slow. Eclipse is very solid and fast. What exactly do you need Swing to be so fast for anyway? There are really only a couple of apps that Swing wouldn't be good for even on older computers. Games, anything related to real-time updating (by real-time I mean like 1 to 10ms resolution updates such as music applications), and quite possibly intense applications that display a TON of data as well as crunch a lot of data in the background. Even so, any app that does a lot of continuous crunching may infact run faster than native because after a short while the inline compiler in the JVM figures out bottlenecks and can speed them up, possibly faster than a native compiled app. Don't get me wrong Brian, I am not saying this is the case all the time. Absolutely there are times where Java/Swing is slow. But let's pick our battles fairly. Swing has gotten a lot faster, and in JDK 1.5 supposedly it will get a bigger boost with more hardware tie-ins so that graphics are rendered even faster. Windows is accellerated via the video card already, so once Java has more direct hardware accelleration support, it will most likely see a nice improvement (assuming developers using the Java2D and 3D apis, which a lot of the widgets are now doing). Still, I have yet to come across a Swing app other than the Forte/NetBeans that is dog slow. JBuilder 7/8 is not all that slow any more. Keep in mind that the way Swing is used can also play a role in how slow a Swing app is. You and so many others judge all Swing apps as if Swing is the culprit. There are WAY too many Swing apps that are poorly written and do not follow the write conventions when dealing with things like trees and tables. Therefore they are slow, but not due to Swing, more because the developer(s) didn't write them properly.

As for Vendor independent, why would you want to load a WSAD project into JBuilder anyway? That isn't the "vendor independent". What the author is describing is that you can load up your J2EE app into any vendor's J2EE App Server so long as it sticks to J2EE standards and not uses a specific vendors proprietary APIs. Keep in mind, WebSphere, which sells for what, $15,000 per cpu per server, they need to have a reason to get people to buy it. It is damn good, but with servers like Orion, JBoss, Tomcat, Resin, Jetty and the bunch all being free or very cheap, there has to be a reason other than J2EE support to spend $300,000 on a few servers. WebSphere, WebLogic and others provide tons of additional yet proprietary capabilities that can really boost performance, load, scalability, etc. The big issue there, and so many MS fans scream about how Java is NOT vendor independent, is that if you USE those proprietary API's, yup you are locked in. Guess what, if I give you my own java library and you use it, oh crap, you are locked in! That is the way it goes no matter what it is. J2EE is just a set of specs that each vendor implements in their own way. If your application follows the J2EE API's exactly, it WILL deploy in any server with minimal work. I say minimal because, well, when is the last time you ever saw two competing vendors have the EXACT same configuration layout for their competing apps? You haven't! Therefore, ever vendor has their own way of having things deployed. The app itself goes unchanged, but the way it is deployed is different. This is why in the J2EE blue prints, Sun specifies the "roles" of development. Front end web/html developer, front end jsp/servlet developer, mid-tier ejb developer, back-end entity developer, and a person that "deploys" all this. Therefore, it would be that persons job on the team to take the "vendor neutral" application and get it to deploy on what ever server(s) he/she is using. The developers shouldn't have to worry about that task in a perfect world, although to be fair we all know that this is very far and few between.

Anyway, the author hits home on a number of points, a few are a bit "Java land", true, but overall he is pretty accurate. The sad thing is, too many people don't really understand a lot of what Java offers, and kill the notion before it gets off the ground either out of fear of moving away from their much loved platform (whether it be MS, Delphi, Cold Fusion, PHP, or what have you), or they are too scared to try to think of learning something all over again when they are comfortable in their ways. We once had a developer that was very knowledgable in PL/SQL. Sure, it could do some good stuff, but would you choose that over learning something new that is better and easier? Everything takes a bit of time when its new. It's getting over that fear that takes the longest.

yep, this technological war(who is the best) will lead nowhere. The fact of the matter is everything is application specific. I guess there is nothing like one particular technology is THE best. If java is good because of its robustness, platform independence etc etc, .Net is good simply because u can get things done with the push of a button. After all, isnt abstraction one of the key elements of object oriented programming ? So why really break ur head over what a "push of a button" is really doing internally.There are so many things to learn and implement that knowing inside out of every technology is neither possible and nor is it required in every case. Developers who have worked for long periods of time on a particular technology invariably tend to believe that their technology is the best. so c, c++, Java, Visual basic, VC++, Delphi, cobol, pascal and even assembly language, some may argue, is THE BEST .

Just what I love. Technology for technologies sake. Perfect. Let's all rewrite our code. Throw away all your apps guys. We're rewriting in java. So what if it costs us more than it's worth. So what if it puts us years behind because we're rewriting. So what if we drag our company down the tubes cause of our technological religious wars.

I can't stand this conversation any longer. I quit.

Java is high performance? You are obviously not talking about desktop apps using Swing.

Vendor independent? That's the biggest pipe dream I've ever heard of. Try loading up your WSAD application in JDeveloper and see if it's "vendor independent."

"Java is simply the unchallenged language of choice for building robust applications." Unchallenged? Really? Somebody better tell Microsoft, 'cause they've challenged Java quite well.

Overall, a decent article but it detaches from reality occasionally and goes into "I worship Java" land.

The difference between MS products and Java products is simply what you have said. MS has "tightened security" in .NET. (i.e. Put in some controls afterwards). Java was written with Security as the first and foremost thought. Let's face it all of MS's products are tied closely to their OS, and there OS's are a petri dish for security.

What our .NET apologist friend here says is true to a degree - like all Microsoft products, many things can be done "just by pushing a button." To do anything other than what the simplistic button does, you have to dig forehead deep into bad code that has yet to hear about MVC or design patterns in general, thus everything custom that you write in .NET looks like it was done by mainframe COBOL spaghetti coders - which, let's face it, is the audience .NET plays to.

With all due respect to Java, so far as I have seen it only has 2 reasons why it is better than .NET:

1. It has been around and it has proven itself...

2. It can be ran on multiple platform, once compiled.

Yet, .NET is a formidable challenger! Microsoft has taking big strides to tighten security, add flexibility, open up to a community.

And as far as companies are concerned, it was always possible in the past to hire an "average" Visual Basic programmer to achive the same results as with "good" Java and "very good" C++ programmer in the majority of application.

Oh, and did I mention that J2SE/J2EE see to be playing catch-up with .NET framework and ASP.NET? ...there.

The bottom line is - to compete with Microsoft we need GREAT IDEs (and we are almost there), incorporation of technologies like SWT and JFace, and stop trying to convince the world of Java's superiority by comparing platform features with .NET - let's just show how far we can take Java, how easy it is to do, and how inexpensive.

To the better times for Java!