Other languages key to Java's future

It is not the Java language that's important - it is the platform that has grown around it. That's according to one veteran of architecture, design and distributed systems development now in the thick of training developers, who reckons the continued success of Java depends on its ability to adapt to modern development demands …

[Mr B]

.NET anyone ???

looks like Sun is taking after the CLI/CLR paradigm. MS .NET was not a bad idea after all.

Now Sun just have to fix the perf issues ... and all will ja(va)zz & MS has to adhere to its own standards so other vendors may be able to efficiently port a MS approved/compatible .NET to other OS/HW.

It's housekeeping season!!!

[mvrx]

ColdFusion has run under Java for years.

ColdFusion, which is still one of the best and most effecient programming languages, has basically been a Java app since 2001. Really it feels like just another Java language in many cases. PHP has been called the poor man's ColdFusion, are rightly so.

It probably would have been adopted as a standard Java core piece if it wasn't for Adobe's greed. Adobe basically has been driving CF into the ground by making it unaffordable to the majority. Leaving IT people with little arguement for their IT managers in a world full of free Java and .NET servers.

The Java engine should get mapped to lots of languages. There is development that just doesn't need to be written in Java or jsp. Developers can code a complex web page in CF in about 1/4th the time of a Java page. I'm not saying CF, or PHP is for everyone. But these languages have their place under a universal engine.

[Torben Mogensen]

.NET vs. JVM

It is no surprise that there are similarities between the .NET platform and having multiple languages running on the JVM. .NET was designed to be a "better JVM" with a similar (but extended) virtual machine (CLR) and a more complete environment.

The JVM had multiple languages running on it long before .NET, and it was in part some of the difficulties with using the JVM with other languages that sparked some of the features in the CLR. Even so, CLR still has a lot of assumptions about the type of language it runs, so it is not quite as language-independent as MS would like us to believe.

[James Anderson]

Lets make all languages as abd as Java?

Why should I run my superbly portable programs written in perl, php, python ruby etc. on an unreliable, badly performing and not very portable JVM?

php and python have superb native implementations on any platform you are likly to use so the only point of running inside a JVM is to get access already written java classes.

But this is a very unusual situation if you are not a Java programmer given the vast number of standard and extension libraries available in most scripting environments.

The only good thing about this is that it will perhaps give the Java bigots a chance to program in a decent language and wean them away from thier do nothing factory classes and thier thousands of lines of try/catch/throws that surround any useful piece of code.