Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapusta | Hacker News Reader

It pretty much depends on industry. Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone. Now look at the web: it was more of a evolution than revolution.

What happened at back-end, like server-side functionality of business apps? They didn't really change and probably won't change for a longer period of time. Even stuff like Hadoop for big data or Groovy for DSLs were built upon the existing JVM.

It's hard to say what devices we'll have in 5 years, or what internet would look like, but i'm pretty sure servers would run good old Java.

View on HN

Even on the "evolutionary" web, I don't think anyone in 2007 would have predicted the rise (and now... fall?) of MVC frameworks or the explosion of jQuery, both of which existed and were relatively popular at the time. Likewise the NoSQL rebellion was a surprise. Five years from now, we'll all be using WebGL-based dyanmic UIs. Or will we?

I think the point is more that 5+ year planning in the tech industry is simply pointless, not that all technologies will be replaced. Sure, there are some constants. We can all safely predict that in five years we'll still be writing drivers and middleware in C, still be using zlib and libjpeg, etc...

Yes, it is extremely difficult to predict which technologies will win over a 5-10 year period vs their competitors. Eg, predicting that jQuery would appear vs the evolution of some other system (ExtJS?).

On the other hand, predicting what changes will occur to a legacy enterprise system tend to be much easier.

In the overall scope of things, Java hasn't really changed that much over the past five years. I think that some long-range planning of the kinds of changes they are thinking about actually makes sense. The need for closures, reified generic types, and an improved type system is unlikely to change in the next 5-10 years.

> stuff like Hadoop for big data or Groovy for DSLs were built upon the existing JVM

Hadoop become popular for handling big data, but I'm not sure if many are using Groovy for DSL's. The 2 big uses for Groovy in industry seem to be (1) scripting on Grails, and (2) quick standalone scripts for testing or booting Java code. For these it rocks but the stuff added after Groovy 1.0, such as DSL's, isn't really being used much.

"Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone."

Blackberry remains much more relevant than windows phone. You also forgot to mention Bada which also has more share than wp and is growing. I'm not trying to beat up on wp but as it stands reality conflicts significantly with marketing.

Edit: why the down mod? if I'm in error, please point out where.

Their new platform (BB 10) is incompatible with old apps. And Bada was merged into Tizen, so it's future looks uncertain for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com