The Next Big Language: For the Enterprise or the Masses?
There’s a lot of talk these days about what will be the next “big” language. A lot of my fellow Java developers believe its going to be a language that runs on the JVM. Will it be Scala, Clojure, JRuby or some other language that has yet to be written? I think when we have such discussions, we need keep in mind that while the JVM may be the most popular platform for enterprise software development, its not the most popular platform for general purpose Web development. That distinction goes to LAMP and PHP.
Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and many other immensely popular blogging and CMS software packages are mostly written in PHP and run on Apache servers. And there are countless Web hosting companies that will host applications running on these software packages for less than $10 a month.
I was recently looking into options for creatng an online store. If I were to go the JVM/Java route, I would need to mostly write that store myself or purchase expensive software to implement it with. I would then need to pay a high monthly fee to host the application on a JVM. This would be fine and probably desirable for a large Fortune 1000 company or a Web startup with lots of funding. However, for myself, I want to start with something I can develop as cheap and quickly as possible. With the popular PHP tools I mentioned, I can find multiple free or very low cost ecommerce plugins and themes I can install and have hosted for a small monthly fee. These tools also create Web sites that look attractive, modern and professional.
Although the JVM and Java has revolutionized software with its ability to run on many operating systems, its dominance is only in large enterprise business software. If there is to be a next “big” language, I think possibly it will be one that can bridge the gap between enterprise software and the general purpose software used by the masses.
JVM Language Job Trends
I thought it would be interesting to see what the job scene looks like for the various JVM languages out there. The languages I chose to feature on my Indeed.com trend chart were Groovy, JRuby, Jython, Rhino, Scala and Clojure. The order in which I listed them is the order I figured they would be in, with Groovy being the highest and Clojure being the lowest. Based on the results below, I was correct on the highest and lowest. However, its the results in the middle that are the most interesting. Jython is neck and neck with Groovy for the top spot. JRuby is second to last and in decline. Scala looks to be on the rise. Can we trust these results as a barometer for the future of these languages on the JVM? Let me know what you think.
You can click on the image below to go to Indeed.com and see a larger version of the chart.
| groovy, jruby, jython, rhino, scala, clojure Job Trends | groovy jobs - jruby jobs - jython jobs - rhino jobs - scala jobs - clojure jobs |
Simple Songs
When one see excellent, yet simple software, its not hard to admire its beauty. In the past few months, I’ve discovered a couple of amazing, yet simple songs from the band, The Breeders. The most amazing thing about these two songs is that they were released 18 years apart.
Fortunately Gone (released in 1990 on the album Pod)
Were Gonna Rise (released in 2008 on the album Mountain Battles)
Larry Ellison’s Cloud Computing Comments Revisited
Back on September 26, 2008, Larry Ellison (CEO Oracle) made the following comments about cloud computing. Larry was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying…
“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”
With the announcement yesterday that Oracle is buying Sun, it will be interesting to see what this means for Sun’s cloud computing technology.
The rant against cloud computing was well covered at the time, but I couldn’t help but to think about it again in light of yesterday’s big news. Actually, my favorite part of the quote is that part about software being like woman’s fashion. So true sometimes.
Cheers Darling
In the last week I’ve really gotten into Irish rock music. Last weekend I rented the movie, Once, based on the recommendation of a friend who said it was a must see. The movie, which was made for a low price of $160,000 has been a huge success. It features the lead singer of the Irish rock band, The Frames. The music in this movie is brilliant. The story is great too. About half way into the movie, I forgot that I was watching a musical. The music simply becomes an integral part of the story. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and would place it at the top of the rock music movie genre, along with the likes of the Almost Famous or The Pianist.
Then a couple of days later, a strange coincidence happened. Fellow blogger, Alex Miller, recommended the rock duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela, and their self titled album. I listened to some samples from the album and immediately scooped up a copy off of the Amazon MP3 Daily Special. Like the movie Once, this album is brilliant. If you enjoy the fusion of different styles of music or love Mexican guitar, then this album is a must. Below is just one example of their unbelievable Mexican guitar rock music.
Back to the coincidence. Rodrigo y Gabriela are from Mexico, but now live in Dublin, Ireland. As I was reading about Rodrigo y Gabriela on the web, I found that after they moved to Dublin, they were forced to become “buskers” in order to earn money. While busking, they became friends with a fellow busker, Damien Rice, who has since also become a successful musician. I had never heard of Damien, so I thought he might be the musician featured in Once. It turns out the featured artist in Once is Glen Hansard. I then Googled for “damien rice frames” to see if there had been any collaboration between the two. Below is the video I found, which is yet another brilliant piece of music from Ireland. The video is rough, but still conveys the energy that existed in the pub the evening. This is a perfect way to kick off the weekend. Grab a glass of Guinness and enjoy. (give the video 30 seconds to turn to the correct position)
Thinking in Stacks (Revisited)
This is the third of three previously published articles related to Java web frameworks that I am republishing. This one is from about fifteen months ago. Choosing the correct stack of software to support a web framework is important. You can either build your own stack or choose from an already integrated stack.
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The number and diversity of Java frameworks (and web/MVC frameworks in particular) is a great thing. But along with choice also comes drawbacks. Which frameworks do I choose for a new web application? Project X is using frameworks A, B and D - do you know these? Are they production worthy? I have heard for every project you should choose the best tools (or frameworks) for the job. Really? I tend to agree to an extent. But is one Web application so different from the next that I need to reevaluate which frameworks I use on each new project?
This leads me into what I really want to discuss. I believe there has been a positive development in the Java world, in that popular “stacks” of open source software are beginning to emerge for developing web applications. I am defining “stack” as simply “multiple software frameworks integrated and used together”. Wikipedia defines a similar term, solution stack. Should project teams start making stack selections instead of framework selections? While frameworks maybe should ultimately be selected based on their individual merits, I think a popular stack can be a great place to start. Some of the benefits of using a popular stack include: accelerated startup time, reduced learning curve, increased software quality and increased knowledge base. So far, I see three stacks emerging as the most popular.
The first stack is the Spring/Hibernate stack. Maybe this one is the most obvious. Over the last fews years Spring and Hibernate have become so popular that they have almost knocked EJB2 out of existence on new projects and forced the creation of the new EJB3/JPA specification. I think this stack is still maturing, in that projects are adding everything Spring has to offer in addition to the already popular Spring IOC and Spring Transaction frameworks. By that, I mean using Spring MVC for the web tier, Spring Web Flow for work flow and any other Spring frameworks that are found to be useful. Maybe I should simply call this stack the “Spring stack”. It should be noted that the very promising Grails framework is built on top of Spring MVC, Spring IOC/Transaction and Hibernate.
The second stack is the JBoss Seam stack, which is basically a stack by definition. JBoss Seam ties together the JSF framework specification, using MyFaces for its default implementation, to the JPA specification, using Hibernate (another JBoss product) for its default implementation. The JBoss Seam framework itself adds work flow and other capabilities to the middle of the stack. Other JBoss frameworks like JBoss Rules can easily be integrated into the stack. If you like the idea of working with J2EE specifications and tools designed for J2EE specifications, then this stack may be the one for you. A big positive of using JBoss Seam is that it reportedly handles of lot of issues developers encounter when working with JSF.
The final stack is the Ruby on Rails (RoR) stack. JRuby 1.0 has just been released and is expected to execute close to if not 100% of RoR applications on the Java platform. The increasingly popular and much imitated RoR gives you everything you need in one package, with ActiveRecord for persistence along with MVC functionality and much more. If you have ever read or listened to interviews with RoR creator, David Heinemeier-Hannsen, you might recall him talking about why he created RoR as a way to quickly create a new web application without having to start from scratch. David wants RoR to give you everything you need to create a web application right out of the box, with little or no configuration, so you can focus on the business logic and not the underlying framework code. I mentioned that the Grails framework/stack is built on the top of the Spring/Hibernate stack. Grails is a Java implementation of a RoR like framework.
This discussion wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the AppFuse project. Created by Matt Raible, AppFuse let’s you quickly create an application skeleton using various combinations of the most popular Java frameworks. Without going into too much detail, you can choose from four popular Java web frameworks (Struts2, JSF, Spring MVC and Tapestry) and three Java persistence frameworks (Hibernate, iBatis and JPA). Spring is used to tie everything together. I think of AppFuse as being a nice alternative to choosing one of the above stacks, while still getting many of the same benefits.
The downside to the emergence of these popular stacks is there are some great frameworks not included in these stacks and not getting as much attention as a result. A few that come to mind are Struts2, Tapestry, Wicket, Rife, Guice and Google Web Toolkit. While I feel having a small number of popular stacks is a good thing, I also see diversity and innovation as good things. I guess you have to make a choice between what is most important to you, starting with a small group of popular technologies, or selecting from the latest and greatest.
If stacks truly become the way the Java community prefers to view software in the future, I think we’ll start to see the creation of new frameworks slow down and a lot more activity continue around the already popular stacks. In true Java tradition, perhaps there will even be a couple new stacks show up in the next year (Google stack anyone?).
Lazy Friday Afternoon Music List
Today’s theme is lesser known, but great alternative music.
- Primitive by Ambulance LTD from album LP iTunes
- The Sound of Fear by Eels from album Daisies of the Galaxy iTunes
- Country Sad Ballad Man by Blur from album Blur iTunes
- Happiness/The Gondola Man by Elliott Smith from album Figure 8 iTunes
- Good to Be On the Road Back Home by Cornershop from When I Was Born For the 7th Time iTunes
Update: When I do a list like this, I thought it would be nice to provide a link for each song.
Vinyl Is About To Make A Comback At My House
This looks like a neat package for a good price. I guess this dates me a little, eh?
EMI To Drop DRM
It looks like the music industry is wising up. Next we need the prices lowered instead of raised.
EMI TO Drop DRM
New iPod Shuffle
I have the original 1G iPod shuffle and really enjoy it. Its a great device to use when running or working out. My wife now has the new shuffle. I really like the new design. It is smaller and comes with a clip, so you no longer have to hang it around your neck. You can get arm bands for the original shuffle, but I’m not a fan of arm bands. My shuffle works great, so I really don’t have a reason to throw down another $80 down for a new one. Too bad for me.