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.