JavaWorld was one of the no doubt many, many organizations on the receiving end of an email blast from the fine people at Active Endpoints, who make the middleware product Active VOS. The gist: Since they’ve allowed people to download their product to try out, a huge portion of their downloads have been coming from India and China. They go on to conclude: US companies have become too caught up in the complexity of their current systems…too content to be dictated to by proprietary middleware vendors…too comfortable with their status quo. Meanwhile, companies without legacy issues — and without the temptation to use those issues as inertia — adopt the most effective and modern middleware technologies rapidly. Is it any wonder, then, that US developers are increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of change, the threat to their jobs, and the technical and political paralysis created by so-called enterprise architectures? This is somewhat self-serving — “use our product to save American innovation!” — and conveniently ignores the fact that Active VOS is much, much cheaper (and therefore attractive to organizations in emerging markets) than Oracle, IBM, or SAP products. However, the idea that the center of this sort of programming might be moving east reminded me of an interview I read with Robert Dewar, a CS prof who’s opposed to teaching Java in college courses. Some key bits: The fact that Java is taught as the core language in so many colleges is resulting in a weak field of computer science grads, he says. The reason: students’ reliance on Java’s libraries of pre-written code means they aren’t developing the deep programming skills necessary to make them invaluable. … “Furthermore, Java is mainly used in Web applications that are mostly fairly trivial,” Dewar says, with his characteristic candor. “If all we do is train students to be able to do simple Web programming in Java, they won’t get jobs, since those are the jobs that can be easily outsourced. What we need are software engineers who understand how to build complex systems. By the way Java has almost no presence in such systems. At least as of a few months ago, there was not a single line of safety-critical Java flying in commercial or military aircraft.” So, maybe the trend Active Endpoints notes is simply the beginning of this shift? Essentially, Java has made things so easy that it’s a commodity language, programmable by the lowest bidder … and in the global economy, the lowest bidder will never be in the US. Technology Industry