Evolutionary Goo

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.

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.

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.

I just watched David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote from RailsConf 2008. As usual, it was very good and offers a nice perspective for someone who works in the world of Java development.

David referenced several interesting books during his presentation.

• Agile Web Development with Rails - Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hannson (I would plug myself too)
• The Secrets of Consulting - Gerald M. Weinberg
• My Job Went To India - Chad Fowler
• Implementation Patterns - Kent Beck
• The Innovator’s Dilemma - Clayton M. Christensen
• Envisioning Information - Edward R. Tufte

If there is one feeling that I left the recent No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in St. Louis this past weekend, it was that there a lot of people very interested in Groovy and Grails. I’ll have to admit that I am one of those people. For the last few years there have been a lot of web frameworks vying to be next Struts. I think Grails is in the best position to grab that market share. Market share isn’t the only important thing here. I think Ruby on Rails is a very well thought out web framework and rails is very similar and has many of the same qualities.

Matt Raible has a couple of  excellent posts on his experiences with Rails and Grail on his blog. These posts are very timely, considering that the Grails gurus just made their way through St. Louis. Its really cool when someone opens up about the inner workings of their job. Thanks Matt.

http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/grails_vs_rails_my_thought
http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/the_linkedin_journey_continues

Craig McClanahan, the creator of Struts and Java Server Faces, is singing the praises of Ruby on Rails. This is awesome PR for Rails, that’s for sure.

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?).

I think this hilarious Ruby on Rails video really says a lot about the difference between the Ruby and Java cultures. Regardless of what camp you are in, this is funny stuff.

Any guesses as to what is in the last jar? I’ve got mine.

I must admit, I hadn’t heard of the XRuby project until today. Competition is a good thing. I’m glad to see the two projects have been talking on how to benefit from each other.