Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to A Technical Paper on Java

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Posted by Todd Gillespie on
Adam, are you getting enough sun (or Sun) there in Michigan?

Wow, you step away from the console and great discussion crops up. Great posts from Dan Wickstrom, Steve Crossan, and Rolf (who we only see rarely, but is worth the wait). The only question I see left open to me personally is from Ben:

Todd: I wrote a paper in late 1999 about how Java is simply inappropriate for web development, mostly based on the strong typing issue you mention and the OO vs. RDBMS issue. So I agree with you. However, I'm looking ahead a bit to the world of XML web services, where the strong typing argument actually plays somewhat in the favor of a strongly-typed language (although you still have to match Java types and XML types). That's why I chose to omit this argument in this particular paper, although I completely embraced it back in 1999. What do you think?
Looking ahead is always interesting; however, I make my salary in the present and the past (legacy systems). The 'promise' of type-matching is a bit troubling; as I have seen how ruinous type mismatch can be to multiplatform projects. That Java promises stable types reassures me, but it is still a language that has trouble dealing with foreign data. Nor does the XML interface alter, as you said,
The other issue is that, when using a strongly typed, highly structured language like Java, you're often forced to take shortcuts like the DataObject approach. Suddenly, your abstractions are broken. The reusability you expected is seriously endangered.
Why are we worrying about bit-widths of types when we have 1-Ghz processors? I still think using a systems language is inappropriate for these tasks these days.

Anyway, these are all predictive, semantic arguments amongst programmers, and of limited practicality; I can certainly see why you[Ben] do not emphasize this in your paper. As a former sysadmin, a more practical analysis would look very like Rolf's. After having left that racket, were I forced to maintain a fleet of middleware rather than a DB + webserver, my response might be characterized as 'kick and scream like a little kid.'