Java under the microscope
Published: 04 Jul 2005 20:00 BST
Can't you release Java as open source software and control compatibility through branding? You could require software to be certified before it's allowed to use the Java name.
There's been a lot of discussion about that. Sun is a democracy, and some believe it could work and some people don't. Right now there are more nays than yeas.
Are you in the nay category?
More often than not I'm in the yea category. But I have to admit I go back and forth.
Compare working on Java five years ago to today.
The big difference in the last five years vs the first five years is that Java has become a central part of many gigantic, mission-critical systems. That requires a paranoid conservatism. When you've got large banks clearing hundreds of billions of financial transaction every night, small bugs have big consequences. Early on, we could do all kinds of crazy stuff, but now we have to worry hard about who we actually affect. Every bug we fix causes problems for somebody who had done a weird workaround. It becomes a very meticulous discipline.
Through projects such as Groovy, Sun is talking about moving the worlds of Java and scripting languages closer together. But I confess I'm not sure how exactly programming languages are different from scripting languages such as PHP, Perl or Python.
Your confusion is well founded. There's an awful lot of loose language. The terms tend to mean different things to different people.
When people talk about scripting languages, they often talk about things that are more toward having a developer be able to slap something together really quickly and get a demo out the door in minutes. How fast the thing runs or how well the thing scales or how large a system you can build tend to be secondary considerations. In the design of Java, we didn't care so much about how quickly you could get the demo out the door, we cared about how quickly we could get a large, scalable system out the door. We ended up making difficult decisions. In general, scripting languages are a lot easier to design than the real programming languages.
The Java design is at two levels: the Java virtual machine and the Java language. All the hard stuff is at the JVM and below. If you can build a scripting language that targets the JVM, you get a certain amount of both properties.
So you're executing script in a JVM?
Yeah. All the Java libraries are available to things written in Groovy. And Java applications can use Groovy. They can incorporate Groovy scriptlets.
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