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An Interview with Enterprise Java Development on a Budget author Christopher Judd
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Article Topics
Enterprise Open Source · Eclipse · Ruby versus Groovy Page 3 of 3
Ruby verses Groovy
Ruby on Rails- is Java web development dead or what?
There is a movement today by prestigious Java experts that I have a lot
of respect for to bash or just move away from Java. Most of them for
more dynamic languages like Ruby.
They usually site that Java is too complex to use for building web
applications or they don’t like some of the language features (I think
they really just miss Smalltalk).
For example, Bruce Tate, in his latest book Beyond Java,
gives some great insights into why Java has risen to its current
popularity despite its shortcomings. He even gives his insights into
what may replace Java. My hope is that Bruce Tate and the other Java
experts don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. While Java does
have its limitations, it has a lot of great things going for it,
including, industry support, great open source and commercial
development tools/frameworks and a strong community.
It’s also possible that I don’t live in the same world that other
experts do because I think Java has grown in complexity to support the
complexities of the problems we are trying to solve. I think MDA and CASE
tools have not succeeded because they underestimated the complexities.
I do a lot of consulting for Fortune 1000 companies where I have to
integrate with many legacy systems using JMS
and support distributed transactions across databases from different
vendors. I would not want to try this with anything other than Java.
I also know my clients, at this time, do not have the palate for using
scripting languages to support their mission critical applications.
Most of my clients are conservative and still starting new development
with Struts even though there are alterative MVC frameworks available.
Of course I also heard that about the virtual machine and Java when it
was first released, so that could change. I would much prefer to see an
effort made to extend Java through Groovy or frameworks like Chris Nelson’s Trails, rather than bashing or abandoning Java.
All that said, after attending Dave Thomas' and David Heinemeier Hansson’s tutorials on Ruby and Ruby on Rails at OSCON 2005,
I went back to my hotel room to give it a try. Even though Dave Thomas
promised that you don’t see that many ClassCastException equivalents
with scripting languages, I still managed to get one in my first
fifteen minutes of writing my first Ruby database application. Since
then, I just have not had the time to invest. There is so much exciting
work going on in the Java space it keeps me very busy.
What are your thoughts on Groovy and its future? How are you using Groovy these days?
I think every developer should have a static language like Java and
a dynamic scripting language like Groovy in their tool box. I think
Groovy will ultimately be adopted by many large organizations because
of its integration with Java, because it’s a JCP standard
and because it enables organizations to leverage their existing Java
investments and knowledge. I think this will make it more palatable
than other scripting alternatives.
I use Groovy about once a week with a Servlet I wrote to execute
Groovy scripts. I use it for testing stuff inside a container such as
class loading issues and data source problems. Other than that, I have
not recently used Groovy much. Like many others, I became frustrated
with Groovy after using it for several months mainly because I was one
of the early adopters and it just was not stable enough at the time.
Too much emphasis was placed on adding functionality rather than
providing a stable base. I think that has changed and I am excited to
try it again now that it is nearing a 1.0 release.
Christopher Judd is the president and primary consultant for Judd Solutions, LLC, international speaker, open source evangelist, Central Ohio Java Users Group coordinator and co-author of Enterprise Java Development on a Budget and Pro Eclipse JST. He is also the author of the children’s book Bearable Moments.
He has spent eight years developing software in the insurance, retail,
government, manufacturing, service, and transportation industries. His
current focus is consulting, mentoring and training with Java, J2EE,
J2ME, web services and related technologies.
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