Java increasingly threatened by new app dev frameworks

Is Java slipping into second-tier status in the application development space? All the attention being given to its rivals these days might give off that impression.

Much touted for its ability to run on multiple platforms via the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), Java grabbed headlines for years before being seriously challenged by .Net and open source scripting variants. Today, these alternatives to Java have gained plenty of adherents. Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM, for example, chose to write its application in PHP instead of Java. “When we set out, we thought we were going to build a Java application on top of Oracle,” said Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder. The company, however, saw PHP maturing and found it “just more accessible than Java, for the average person,” Oram said.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has made its .Net platform a serious player in the enterprise space. A November 2007 report by Info-Tech Research Group stated the case for .Net becoming more popular than the Java platform in enterprises.

But don’t count Java out just yet.

“Everywhere you turn, Java touches something. It’s used in databases, it’s used to drive the Web [systems] of big companies like eBay,” said Rick Ross, president of the DZone developer community and founder of Javalobby, a Web community for Java developers. He also is a Java developer.

The Java industry remains very, very large, Ross said. “All of it put together is literally billions and billions of dollars,” said Ross, noting the use of Java by everyone from IBM to Oracle and its latest major acquisition, BEA Systems.

Microsoft .Net is attracting a lot of smaller developers The Tiobe Programming Community Index, which ranks the popularity of programming languages, has Java at No. 1 for February, the same place it held a year ago. Following it are C, Visual Basic, PHP, C++, Perl, Python, and C#. Further down the list are Delphi, JavaScript, and Ruby. (Tiobe ratings are based on the worldwide availability of skilled engineers, courses, and vendors, with popular search engines used to calculate the ratings.)

Info-Tech, however, found Microsoft has a strength in its ability to offer a single soup-to-nuts stack featuring .Net, the Exchange e-mail system, and SQL Server database. “[Companies] want one throat to choke,” said George Goodall, an Info-Tech senior research analyst and author of the firm’s November report.

“We’re not particularly bullish on .Net technology over Java technology, but the difference here is that .Net for most applications is good enough,” he said.

Info-Tech sampled 1,900 companies, most of which are midmarket companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues. The study found that 12 percent of enterprises focus exclusively on .Net as compared to 3 percent focused just on Java. Also, 49 percent center primarily on .Net, compared to 20 percent for Java.

Despite the survey’s midmarket focus, Goodall noted that even respondent companies with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion had a similar .Net preference as the midmarket respondents. Still, the survey did find that the popularity of .Net decreases very gradually as the size of enterprises increases. But Goodall cautioned that in such companies, .Net’s popularity decline did not come from an increase in Java usage, but instead from a preference for other development platforms in heterogeneous environments.

Even faced with increased competition from the likes of .Net, Java is nowhere near the end of its life, Info-Tech’s report concluded. The platform has incredibly strong allies and an immense code base. Just as user sites must tend to legacy Cobol code, so will they have to tend to a lot of Java code in the future. “[Java is] not going to disappear,” Goodall said.

Rails framework founder David Heinemeier Hansson also likened Java to Cobol. “I think Java is still relevant in the sense that languages never die. There will be systems running in Java 20 years from now,” he said, “just like there are still lots of Cobol systems around from way back when.”

New frameworks are gaining traction among developers “Ruby, PHP, Python, and similar platforms have definitely taken a big chunk out of the Java brain trust,” said Hansson. “We have a large constituency of Rails users who are Java refugees.”

New frameworks such as PHP and Ruby on Rails indeed “have taken a huge bite out of the territory that used to belong to Java and .Net,” said Tim Bray, Sun’s director of Web technologies — emphasizing that .Net has the same issue. “I totally don’t believe, based on what I see, that .Net still has the kind of growth that it had for a few years there starting in the late 1990s.The evidence seems to show that while Java isn’t the hottest growth spot, it’s still the largest single ecosystem out there,” he added.

Hansson agrees that .Net is also threatened by new frameworks, but he noted that .Net nevertheless seems to be taking away mindshare from Java in shops predisposed to use Microsoft technology.

A program manager at a government agency, who wished to remain anonymous, said solutions such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft products are offering alternatives to Java. “On the server side, Java will always have a place in stitching things together and customizing, but to turn out nice applications quickly that are maintainable, I see the other tools starting to take over that space,” the program manager said.

Sun looks ahead to a world where Java may not be king At Sun, CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains a staunch Java advocate but acknowledges Java is not the only contestant in the show these days. At the SugarCon 2008 conference for SugarCRM users earlier this month, Schwartz noted Sun’s Da Vinci Machine project to extend the JVM to accommodate other languages. “The intent is to say, ‘Look, Java is one language, but it is not a hammer for all nails. It happens to be a really, really good hammer,'” Schwartz said.

Bray admits that the Java language “is starting to look a little boring to the young rabble-rousers in the community,” and says the Java language is “replaceable.” However, Bray argues that the Java platform — the JVM, APIs, and libraries — is here to stay. The JVM is “insanely popular,” and the consensus is the libraries are about the best, he said.

In anticipation of a less Java-centric world, Sun is working to embrace the new technologies. Case in point is the JRuby effort to enable Ruby to run Rails applications on the Java platform, Bray said. Meanwhile, work is being done to spruce up the Java language with closures and other capabilities, he said. (Closures lets pieces of code be passed around and used elsewhere without the need to declare a subroutine.)

Rails founder Hansson agrees with Sun’s direction. “I do think the mentality of ‘Java is the answer, what was the question again?’ is gone. Even Sun realizes that now, which I think is healthy. There are lots of domains where Java is just too heavy and cumbersome an environment to dance with.”