simson garfinkel has recently written
simson garfinkel has recently written a slight misguided, imho, article on why he hates java. as one might expect, he received a good deal of mail over it and was prompted to write a response.
yes, we know that java is not the absolute fastest thing out there. and, yes, we know that the java gui interface sucks. but, that’s not why most people use java these days. it’s prefect for building web backends. development is fast and there is tons of open source java code out there to help you along. just look at the struts is a great example of java technology at its best for the web. the design paradigm for web applications is vastly different from the types of applications that garfinkel gripes that java is terrible for. we’ve known this for a long time now. most of the developers i know stay as far away from fat client apps written in java as they can. unfortunately, there are those who believed sun that java is viable for these types of applications. corel took a stab at it with little success and inprise is in the process of trying it with jbuilder. there are some all java fat client apps like the sun’s forte development environment that show some promise. however, in practice, they’re too slow and have very buggy interfaces. java is great for what it’s good at, web application development. with java, you can develop and test code on one machine (say a windows box) and deploy the same java bytecode on a different machine (say a solaris box) without changing a line of code. sun’s claims of write once, run anywhere are a bit, dubious, but if you are careful, it can work.
