Oracle has the right to bundle whatever crap-ware they want. If that sullies their reputation or draws out alternatives, that's a good thing.
My problem is that as of now, they don't.
I'm not a huge fan of maintaining installed software, though -- if you have a silent auto-updater, that's not bad, but otherwise you're going to be either annoying people with frequent updates, or supporting (often accidentally) scores of old versions all the time.
What else is there besides Java that can run in the browser and do audio recording, MIDI input, realtime audio DSP, etc.? Obviously not everyone wants fancy audio capabilities in the browser, but I imagine there are plenty of other "niche" capabilities that other people need that are impossible in the browser w/o Java.
I do get a sense now that we're going to see the Java security hole largely closed (thanks to browser limitations and Oracle fixes), but the damage has certainly been done.
Similarly, I think Java's worst nightmare scenario wouldn't be end users deciding they don't like it. (Heck, like with Flash most of them don't even know when they're using it.) It would be some massive headline-making Java-related security breach at a Fortune 500 company convincing IT departments around the world to start thinking that it's time to migrate to a less risky platform.
Sorry, but techie's opinions are overrated. iOS and mobile video brought Flash down a few notches, not us.
At the time that looked like a big gamble but with hindsight the gamble has paid off for everybody but Adobe and Flash developers.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Killing Java would be a ridiculous thing to do. You live in such a bubble.
The whole community is full of de facto "standards" and half baked libraries which are usually results of someone's summer project.
The language in and of itself is alright (although massively outdated compared to more modern alternatives like C#), but the virtual machine and the nature of the ecosystem make me want to blow my brains out on daily basis. Don't even get me started on the recent security debacle.
I don't know a lot about these new *.js technologies but if they are right tools for the job, then yes, I wouldn't have anything against using them where appropriate.
Sometimes the JVM isn't the right tool; Java the language is often the wrong tool. But when you need to write large, high-performance, backend software, the JVM is pretty much the only rational choice. C/C++ is too expensive effort-wise, in development, in maintenance and in monitoring. Erlang is awesome, but it's too slow for some things. .Net is not robust on non-windows platforms (I'm not sure about this, but this is the common perception). Go is slower than Java, lacks the huge ecosystem, and also doesn't provide all the JVM goodies like runtime instrumentation and profiling, hot code swapping, good monitoring etc. Rust is too immature (and won't give you those benefits either). So, pretty often, the JVM is the only choice and you think it's time to kill it?
I'm kinda curious to get you started on the security debacle, actually.
Do you ship Java software that runs client-side? Spring is usually for server-side; if you're just on the server side, though, how has the security debacle affected you?
I generally agree about the ecosystem (yup, just gotta avoid most of it) and the core language (though the clunkyness is somewhat mitigated by IDE facilities for auto-generating code).
But I mostly spend my time on either client-side JavaScript or server-side Java, and it's the JavaScript side that drives me crazy -- in the JVM, things just work. I've hit runtime bugs maybe twice in 14 years working with Java on the server side, and one of those was on the AS/400 (!), and unless I'm doing something stupid, it's fast.
I'd say their ham-handed approach to security and their contentment to sit with their thumbs up their arses, while vulnerabilities whose magnitude compare favorably with the US national debt are being exploited widely is more than enough reason to hate Java.
At least Microsoft has the good sense to issue OOB patches when something serious enough comes up!
The current state of Java means that running the browser plugin paints a huge bullseye on your back. It got bad enough that the freaking department of homeland security recently issued a warning to disable the plugin for your own good.
Do you have any idea how ubiquitous java is in the enterprise? Everywhere uses java.
Have you ever worked on anything that needs to be scalable, extensible and maintainable?
Scalability, maintainability, and extensibility are not unique to Java.
If you're talking about Java, you're talking about the browser plugin. It all executes on the same VM.
You can't simply declare it off limits given the massive and repeated security issues surrounding it, combined with its ubiquity (especially for countries not ending in "America" - Clientside java is very popular in European banks.)
I can't see how this makes any more sense than "If you're talking about Visual Studio, you're talking about Mac OS X. It all executes on the same processor." Yes, they both share the same underlying technology, but they are hardly indistiguishable — you can certainly talk about one without addressing the other. You could delete the browser plugin from every computer on the planet and it wouldn't make normal Java apps work any better or worse. The plugin depends on the Java platform, but the Java platform is not in any way dependent on the plugin.
> You can't simply declare it off limits given the massive and repeated security issues surrounding it
I'm not declaring it "off-limits" — I'm suggesting that it is irrelevant to the discussion here. Yes, there are security issues with it, but since nobody here is saying "I think the Java browser plugin is a boss idea," you're either arguing with nobody or trying to denigrate the JVM as a client and server technology based on the fact that it isn't suitable for embedding in a browser. I can't see any way that the Java plugin is really relevant. Similarly, if I went and wrote a terrible plugin to allow Ruby "applets," bringing up that plugin as a criticism of Ruby in other contexts would not be productive.
Modern VM design, vastly superior flagship language, pretty solid on the side languages* too, better platform support (Thanks Xamarin!), and best yet it's Free. Like really Free, not Oracle-style "Here's the source code so you can maybe hack on our implementation a bit but if you try doing anything we don't like we'll sue your ass" 'free'.
* Not really a great Lisp for the platform yet, but I prefer F# to Scala. Much cleaner syntax, 'feels' more functional.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. It's true that the JVM is one of the things in the Java ecosystem that is looked upon as a massive success.
And it's also true that the CLR really is technically superior to the JVM on a whole slew of points. It has runtime-level support for generics (meaning C# lets you do all sorts of nice things with them that Java doesn't support). It has user-defined value types. It supports coroutines (i.e., 'yield'). It supports anonymous functions and closures. For those who just can't leave pointers alone, it even has unsafe blocks. And so on.
So while it's definitely not "proven" in a sense that will impress your average PHB, in terms of technical merit I don't think there's really any comparison. Mono wins hands-down.
This is kind of tongue in cheek, but seriously... NodeJS is relatively new (since 2009) and it's gained a LOT of traction... it isn't the perfect solution, but then again nothing is. I like Mono and have used it, they've worked through a lot of the earlier issues, and it's pretty decent at this point... IIRC it's the core of the Unity tools, as well as having Xamarin tools available to support the majority of mobile platforms.
Is there anyone here with experience developing for Mono on Linux and Mac? What's it like in reality?
Compared to most other open source platforms, OTOH, I don't think it feels like one's been relegated to a language underclass at all. Of course you don't get the benefit of working in the operating system's official first-class language like you do on Windows, but in fairness that's a privilege that you never get to enjoy when working in most languages - including Java, Python, Ruby, and so forth.
As far as why it's less popular outside of Windows, I'm inclined to think that's mostly down to social effects. Java's got the Linux enterprise development space so wrapped up right now that I suspect trying to pivot to Mono would be a bit like trying to push a glacier. Businesses aren't in the habit of rewriting millions of lines of code on a whim.
That said, I've used MonoDevelop in Windows and OS X and it works pretty damn well. The Mono project has done a great job mirroring the .NET API and runtime.
(And also, doesn't Mono just replace the hypothetical threat of a lawsuit from Oracle with the hypothetical threat of a lawsuit from Microsoft?)