Saturday, October 6, 2007

Java (seemingly) on the decline again (for the n'th time) ?

Yet another (wishful) doomsday prediction for Java surfaces in the form of pingdom's survey of cherrypicked sites that mostly run on LAMP. Despite the scant respect that surveys and benchmarks should rightly be treated with, I thought it was worth posting a short (though insufficient) response to this one. Seems rather amusing, doesn't it, that during more than a decade of Java's existence, there have been innumerable death knells sounded for Java and yet, it continues to survive, flourish and reinvent itself? Here's what I had to say response to Nati Shalom's query-

"The pingdom sample space is misleading, to say the least. Countless companies in the banking space, insurance, manufacturing and logistics rely on Java engines (not necessarily Java EE, but surely a Java SE server at least). Add to that eBay, Amazon, AdWords and the usage of Hadoop and Nutch in Yahoo, and you have every important player that matters. And we haven't even started talking about niche, little known implementations like those at JPL, Nasa. The talk of TCO and expense associated with J2EE is complete B.S, of course. There're arguably more F/OSS tools and technologies in the Java world than there are in the LAMP world. Additionally, the unparalleled security and trust associated with Java implementations, and the confidence they rightly inspire in the large financial institutions and telcos is worth a dedicated post altogether.
All of this makes you realize that pingdom's survey borders on FUD and ceases to be a respectable publication due to the sample space deliberately chosen."