Why Java might lose against Ruby (or Python, or PHP ...) in web development

There I said it...

There I said it, Java might lose its rank in web development. Sun GPL'd Java and integrates scripting languages. Ruby is going on with JRuby, Python has it's JPython pendant, nowadays PHP runs/compiles on Java. But that is not enough, Java may lose the struggle for the #1 internet language.

I always thought that a language like C# will accomplish the task to overthrow the "heir to the throne", but that was a little bit naive and sounds ridiculous: Java and .NET are way too similar for that. Lisp? SML? OCaml? Haskell? No, these languages need (damn) good programmers to complete the task, and there are not enough good people out there. To shift the workload needed in IT-business kind of standardized people are needed (no offense meant!): People only thinking in mathematics, functional programming and definitions, or simply only programming recursions seem to be the wrong way to work this load. The industry needs standard tasks to be done in standard ways by standard workers. If it wouldn't be that way, no-one would program Perl/PHP/Java/C# or similiar languages/scripts any more, they would program such complex algorithms like Shell-sort in only four lines (as I did in SML more than one and a half decades ago).


The three frontier war

Many people are complaining about Java, it is fighting a three-frontier-war. The arguments:

1. Java is losing against Perl or PHP because they "get things done". Perl is "quick in programming". PHP is a starters programming language, fast and simple (be honest: nearly no good known project uses PHP5 with objects and Exception-handling) and, moreover, it's good for small to medium sized projects and has (like Perl) not to deal with the (typing and casting) overhead of strong typing.
   
2. Java is losing against Ruby or Python because they "get things done faster". Ruby on Rails seems to rock for (small to medsize) projects and Python seems at first glance to be a good replacement for all.
3. Java has, because of the mature kind and popularity, to match (or: to be a target of comparisons) with functional programming languages like Lisp and Haskell, for example, which "know what the programmer wants" without explicitely explaining it by syntax.
   

I do not even mention runtime behaviour, everyone knows that C (or even C++ compared to an old JVM) is magnitutes faster than Java and everyone thinks that Java still is slow. So, Java is dead, isn't it?

Let us, just for a minute, forget the discussions and the pro's and con's of the points mentioned above, all this was discussed endlessly all over the internet before. Let us not talk about the verbosity of Java programs compared with dynamic language A or the fact that programs can be written so much more elegant using language B, because in B there are not all those conventions which clog the programmer using Java.


Who is killing Java?

Though having the best intentions, Java programmers are killing Java. I know that sounds weird, but I watched that for nearly 5 years now. The fact that Java people, (better: Java software / better: Java frameworks) cannot simply "be simple" discourages. And directs programmers and projects got the train: Ruby on Rails, as an example, is the exact opposite by just being simple. Just "getting the thingies done" is what people want to see after endless fussing around with XML and EJB, hoping that it will work out anyhow. Having hundreds of pages of documentation explaining complex frameworks, who cares? Ever started a new experimental web container in Tomcat and not simply copied the web.xml without exactly knowing what's in there? It got far too complicated.


The world is watching

Continue doing complicated stuff and you will see the people running away from Java. The problem about Java is not the language, the problem about Java is that Java does not provide a "simple start" anymore, not with all the programmers using these fancy frameworks nowadays. I'm not talking J2EE - that is too complicated, too. But that's only interfacing, at least partly. Looking at the frameworks deriving from J2EE and even if you have an IDE like NetBeans or Eclipse installed, you cannot have a web/http-service up and running in 2 minutes. Too much configuration - which needs too much knowledge of how to be configured. And, yes, surely, you cannot simply talk to a database, that would not be 1337 enough, you need a second (third, fourth ...) layer like EJB/Hibernate etc., all XML / annotations configured. At least we can do it, who bothers if we need it? And who cares for SQL, anyway? There are so much frameworks, why bothering with the simple thingies 'round there?

C'mon. I heard of a project where four (practicvally immutable) database tables had to be filled with logging informations and they used the XML-ORM-Mapping iBatis framework for that. Be honest, ever heard of the word "overkill"? Nooooo, you are right: Better configuring it using XML, or even better, let the software write the configuration! Write your makefiles in XML (including self-injected file commands). Keep it unreadable, that's a kind of job-security, too! Why typing some 10 lines of code when we simply may let the preparser generate it by configuring all in fourty lines of XML?

Never mind. Just keep on killing Java.

Totally secure internet-browsing in 15 minutes

Browsing the internet without fear

Nowadays, the internet is a hazardous place. There are viruses, trojans, Cookies that store and reveal your data, people phishing your money from your bank account with special worms and so forth. The problem is, you never can be sure if your computer is suffering from malware and re-routes your online-banking-request to some russia servers. Hell, I am not sure myself (and at least I am supposed to know such things).


The old solution: Rebooting your computer

In former times I solved the problem pretty easy: I downloaded a bootable Linux CD, i.e. the Knoppix Live CD. All I had to do was to insert the CD, reboot the computer and, eventually, setup the network so I could browse the internet. The advantage of such Live CDs is obvious: They start a complete and fresh operating system every time, and because they do it from CD, malware can not change the programs or data and install unwanted software on the computer. But, be honest, do you want to reboot your computer (twice, you have to start your original OS again afterwards) to simply transfer some money via online banking? Because this all was to time-consuming I stopped doing it.

The next step was to split responsibilities between different Browsers. "Daily surfing" with IE and "secure surfing" with Firefox. But again, this is not totally safe. I used Firefox more and more and because of that I had to at least empty the caches/cookies/passwords from time to time to regain a little bit of security and privacy. That was no fun, either. And you never know when security holes will be exploited in the future, even if it's Firefox.


The new solution: Virtually, no security holes

Yesterday, I hit on something in the web that sounded promising to solve these problems. It is an article about setting up a virtual machine as a window, just like any other program you use on your computer on a daily basis. The punchline is that you do not have to restart your computer to start an other operating system from a so called Live CD image, no you run the complete OS in a separate window on your desktop. Then you can use Firefox in there to browse the web. And it is easily done, too.

All you have to do is download and install the virtual machine VMWare, get a Live CD - iso-file and setup the VM environment. A so called iso-file is nothing more or less than an image from a CD named "blahblah.iso".

The steps for that (in short form, for more information please visit lifehack.org) :

1. Download and install VMWare for your operating system from this place. You need administrative access to install it, though.
   
2. Download an iso-image of Linux. You can find Fedora Core here (approx. 700mb), Ubuntu Linux here (approx. 715mb) and, the smallest of all, Puppy Linux here. Fedora and Ubuntu will be easy to get up and running and have Firefox in their package, Puppy Linux will need less resources but a little hands-on experience shown below.
3. Download the prepared VMWare configuration files from here and unzip them into a new folder. Open the file "OS.vmx" in this folder and edit the line that starts with "ide1:0.fileName =", this option must point to your iso-file. For example, if you downloaded Ubuntu and stored it in "C:\Linux" the line should be - ide1:0.fileName = "C:\Linux\edgy-desktop-i386.iso"
4. Doubleclick on the file "OS.vmx" (to start VMWare) and wait.

Fedora Core's Firefox is clickable as small icon left from the "System" - menue or in "Applications -> Internet -> Firefox", but this Fedora only serves resolutions up to 800 x 600

What happens is that VMWare starts the operating system from the iso-file as if it were an ordinary CD. That bears the advantage that malware cannot install itself on the "operating system in a window". Every time you restart VMWare will be as if you start it the first time. You now are safe to surf whatever you want, after shutting down VMWare your computer is in the same state than before.

The screen resolution of Ubuntu and Fedora Core can be changed via menue "System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution", this Ubuntu serves up to 1024 x 768

Ubuntu and Fedora Core automatically get the network connection from VMWare via DHCP. If you prefer Puppy Linux (because it's smaller, does not use that much resources and therefore starts faster) you will have to run the network wizzard, select the interface by pressing on the button "eth0" and then press the button "Auto DHCP". After this you can browser via the "Browse" - icon left on the desktop.

Puppy loves the network: Start the network wizzard to connect. For me Puppy only ran using the Xvesa and not Xorg window system and does not have the Gnome desktop installed.

Some words on usability and needed resources: I prefer Ubuntu over Fedora Core because it starts faster and provides you with a screen resolution up to 1024 x 768. But this merely is a matter of taste. A Pentium IV with 2GHz (AMD 2500+) and some 512 megabyte of RAM should suffice to run the virtual machine fluently on your computer. You can "suspend" the OS using a VMWare feature, this is like normal going in suspend mode and means that the "operating system window" will be stored on your hard disk. Starting it afterwards keeps your preferences and running programs. But it keeps the cookies, too.

So, happy safe surfing and remember: The fact that you are not paranoid does not mean, that they do not chase after you... .