WatTF? - Jim Murphy

Java is an enterprise software language and almost never used “out in the wild” where Web 2.0 style sites and services live. At least that’s what I keep hearing. Most web types think in terms of PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby it seems.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that there is remarkably few multi-lingual programmers out there. You usually find people attached to a programming stack the way a baby duck attaches to its mother. Programmers follow around their stack quacking that its best/only way to solve their particular problem. I know we would like to think this doesn’t apply to us but I think most of us have been “baby ducked” early and that shapes how we look at the world for a good long while.

If you’re under 30 and build web stuff then you probably know PHP. Why is that? More than likely because its always been there and its free. Every cheap host has a PHP runtime available so that’s what you were “baby ducked” on. As you got more sophisticated you might have started to look at newer environments like Python or Ruby. Thats what everyone you talked to were talking about.
Alternatively if you work in a corporate environment theres a pretty good chance that you’re writing in Java or .NET. You don’t signup on godaddy + cheap host for these projects because you have an IT operations group that takes care of machines, app servers, databases and provisioning for you. YMMV.

These are 2 completely different worlds that have nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the stack and people around the stack. Web 2.0 style projects don’t use Java as a rule NOT because the syntax is wrong or its slow or anything like that. I don’t know of many cheap hosting providers that make Java or .NET available unless you get into dedicated or virtual private setups where you control the entire stack. They exist but are far from the norm - and they aren’t comparably cheap. Instead the model is around FTP of text files and interpreted languages since its easier to manage those environments in a shared host environment. So the ecosystem of people in that world have different expectations.

Enter Amazon EC2 and the larger cloud computing approach. We’re “baby ducking” a new generation of developers that think in terms of cheap utility cloud computing where you don’t FTP text files to a shared hosted server - you have control over the entire stack by default. You own the whole thing.

This shift makes Java development in the cloud a viable option especially to ex-enterprise developers that are de-siloing their applications, systems or selves to reach beyond their firewalled-gardens and out into the Internet at large. Mix-in the emerging renaissance of new languages that target the JVM but offer technical or programmer productivity advantages and the JVM may not look so staid and corporate as it used to.

So we may see an increasing number of enterprise Java developers (ducks) that participate in Web 2.0 style projects after all.

Disagree?