An article over at the Register offers up a number of interesting points on the future of Java. Yes, I know its been said many times that Java’s days are numbered, but with the increasing availability and popularity of languages like Python & Ruby. What the report also points out is and Java’s increasingly complex and bloated base making the system unwieldly and difficult to use for anything but enterprise projects.
The Java platform is becoming increasingly complex, the JVM has an obesity problem, the addition of generics has added complexity to the previously clean syntax, the layers of XML configuration required to plumb a full J2EE stack are weighing developers down. Tate puts a lot of this down to the fact that the big players (starting with Sun and IBM) are focused on large-scale enterprise development projects.
Is this the beginning of the end for Java or is it merely moving onto new pastures? When it leaves though it’ll most certainly be replaced by the new contenders Python, Ruby and their frameworks; Django, Rails, etc.
