Beyond Java

After my recent post about the advent of the sunset of java I’ve read Bruce Tate’s “Beyond Java”, which seems to fall into line with my argument.

What I did particularly like about the book was the statement that Java is a language for system programming (which cached in on a lot of shortcomings of C/C++), but not an application language.
He tries to give us an idea of the things to come. As examples he points to Ruby on Rails and Seaside. What I miss in his book is the non-web perspective, because currently we see a trend towards real multi tier apps, that have a web(service) tier and a richclient (AJAX, Flex, Laszlo whatever) tier. The real richclient is gathering steem driven by IBMs Eclipse RCP endeavour.

And what I see currently is that the Java community itself is falling apart into different camps:
* The Webapps folk (Spring and friends)
* The Swing folk
* The Eclipse folk

They all employ their own utilities and modelling/ meta-approaches.

Another thing that Bruce does not mention is the integration power of dynamic languages. Ruby has excellent support to wrap C libs (not comparable to the average JNI-nightmare) and so has Python. Both languages provide bindings to dynamically support windows OLE automation in a natural way (by calling methods).