Java Enterprise Edition is Dead

I am reading an opinion piece on Java EE. It states that that there were two winners for application servers. There was WebLogic which was best. And there was JBoss that was free. However web services and REST seemed to take away their steam.

Do you actually need an app server? Maybe you can just get by with plain old JDBC. Here is the killer stat which might prove Java EE is a dead end. Nobody implements Java EE 6. There is only open source GlassFish. Ouch.

Java is not dead. But Java Enterprise Edition may very well be. I am glad I did not spend too much time with Java EE.

Scanner Comes Through

I have a new project I am hacking on. The goal is to process a huge file of URLs. Then I want to crawl those web sites and extract information to a database. I will provide some more specifics in the future.

The first task at hand was to deal with this huge file. It was 10 gigabytes large. Most text editors could not handle it. I wanted to see if my Java classes could deal with it. So I coded up a UNIX head program. It lists of the first 10 lines from the file.

Bamm. It worked. The Scanner class could read the first 10 lines with ease. The first time it did so there was a small pause. But I could read and process the first 10 lines. It seems to reason I can process the next 10 lines, and so on.

I will keep you posted on the progress of my little project. Next step is to figure out how to do database access with Java. I am thinking JDBC. But there may be better or more interesting technologies to try out.

Java Running on Apple II c

I just heard that a subset of Java can now run on the Apple IIc computer. Bamm. Of course there are some limitations. You need a real Apple II c with the 65C02 microprocessor. That means Apple II e computers don't work with this port.

The good news is that some of Swing is available. No AWT or JDBC is supported yet. The eventual goal is to port all of Java to the Apple. Right now there is also a JDistro available. This is a desktop which is written in Java Swing. JDistro is a limited version too that can only run 1 app at a time.

The whole thing fits on 3 floppies. Source code will be made public. This seems pretty hard core as the Apple II is some hardware from yesteryear. Now we just need Java ported to the Tandy Coco III, and I will be complete.

Java History

I started learning how to code in Java this year. It is like I arrived very late to the party. I just hope the party is not over. Now it is not like I never heard about Java over the years. I just did not get into it until now.

I read a humorous post that reflected back on Java from the beginnings. There is a lot to the history. However I found many of the milestones were events that I heard about.

Java actually started out as the Oak programming language. The name was switched to Java. The Java 1 developer's conference had a mighty turn out. Version 1.1 of the JDK had JDBC for database connectivity.

Java 2.0 came out. Then there was Enterprise Java beans. I recall the C++ programmers on my project getting excited about EJBs when they first came out. Then the excitement died down. To tell the truth, I don't really know much about EJBs. I assume they are a way to store data you get from the DB.

Web services got hot in the Java world. I also recall the craze where every team on my project wanted to publish some web services. That was short lived though. I saw a metric that 75% of developers used Java back in 2003. I wonder if the number still hold true.

Another metric I spied was that 4.5M developers use Java today. That's a heck of a lot of people. What is the future of Java? I read an article every now and then about problems with Java 7. Time to get familiar with the new Java landscape. Perhaps this party has really only just begun.