java--forever, twists, lows, rebirth!

Summary:Looking back on Java in the past 20, first of all experienced the computer era of the hing and decline, and then into the field of servers and smart phones, and then in the DHS "unsafe" definition of the difficult to move forward, and finally put Oracle embrace is now poised to burst into the second spring. Are there other languages that have such ups and downs?

If you say "forever, twists, lows, rebirth" to describe Java, I think it is not too.

In 1991, James Gosling led a team called "Green team" to develop a new language and network system for the next generation of digital devices and computers. After 4 years of hard work, the project eventually became a fruition and was named Java.

Java has a C-like syntax and a "compile-once-run-anywhere" flexibility. Through the virtual machine mechanism, the code can be compiled at run time on the underlying platform. Looking back on Java in the past 20, the first is the computer era of the boom and decline, and then into the field of servers and smartphones, and then in the DHS (U.S. Department of Homeland Security) "unsafe" definition of the difficult to move forward, and finally put Oracle (Oracle) Embrace is now poised to burst into the second spring. Are there other languages that have such ups and downs?

After the introduction of Java, Sun found that there is a problem in the market-the computer and non-computer fields are separated from each other. Sun sees this as an opportunity to connect the two together and bring about a computer revolution. "The unifying theme is the network. Gosling said, "Looking at the market at the time, two areas of the manufacturers fragmented, not a unified network." So there are times when you have to repeat a lot of experiments, but these have been solved in computer science 30 years ago. "The problem is that consumer electronics makers are not considering using networks, such as cross-platform public APIs or code reuse," You can hardly find any software reuse. All software can only be repeatedly created. The modular concept we put forward will eventually change this situation. ”

Success is not a smooth road

The first five years of Java's debut, it has become a well-deserved compiler high-performance spokesperson. Over the past five years, everyone has shifted their focus to enterprise applications. "Looking back at Java EE's world-domination scene is still vivid," Gosling said. Our only mistake is to focus all our energies on this, and all resources are prioritized to the EE, leading to the inability to devote more energy to the world of desktop development. ”

Oracle Java Platform Development vice President Saab said, "in the 90 's, most developers are devoting their energies to the writing of desktop applications." By the year 2000, Pet.com's success attracted a large number of followers. The industry has shifted focus from the desktop to the HTML app. With the advent of smartphones and tablets, touch-screen mobile applications are also standing in the air vents. So for the next trend is difficult to grasp, which involves the timing, geography, people and. ”

Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) introduced and divided Java into three platforms in 1998: Java 2 standard Edition (J2SE), J2ME, and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (ee). Me means a small device and an embedded system. I was promoted on flip phones and became standard at the time. Gosling said, "Me has done well enough to be the most powerful smart phone development platform at the time. But now it's getting forgotten, because Android is so dazzling. ”

As a standalone platform, Java me is marginalized. Cameron Purdy, senior vice president of Oracle Development, said that the next version of Java 9 would unify all platforms, "Compared to SE, me being independent but slow to grow." The modular nature of Java 9 will enhance the reusability of Java me, which will be a powerful weapon for attacking Android and iOS. ”

Fall into the trough

With Sun in the last 10 years of the downturn, Java is not immune to experience wasted time. IBM quoted $6.5 billion, Sun did not agree, $7.4 billion, Oracle got sun.

Under Oracle Management, Java has performed well in the first few years, with 0 of major failures becoming synonymous with security. But in January 2013 the situation began to turn bad, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advised people to try not to use Java. As an enterprise-oriented software company, patching bugs is faster than Oracle's short board, and is simply not comparable to Microsoft or Adobe for the mass consumer. Others are measured in hours or days, and Oracle is the unit of the month.

Purdy that Oracle has done its best to repair and understand the importance of this short board. The crux of the problem is how to build a team that can still independently after losing Gosling and so on. "We've heard a lot of questions, but in fact we've been constantly joining forces and trying to find solutions," he said. ”

Rebirth of the ashes of fire

DHS's public statement is tantamount to crushing the last straw of Java, and many people predict that Java will no longer be the scene. But things are slowly turning, and many Java fans are starting to defend Java's reputation. Dr. Dobb's journal editor, Andrew Binstock, published an editorial titled: "Java looks pretty healthy even in the face of death."

For Oracle's takeover, Gosling expressed his delight, "I was pleasantly surprised to learn of the news." Oracle is a very good guardian and far exceeded my expectations. At first I was worried that it would become the second Solaris, and now it seems that I am over the other. ”

Over the first five years of Java, Oracle had to rebuild a Java team. "We spent a lot of time looking at the whole process to determine how to fix the bug, from the input to the release mechanism, we reviewed a lot of code. Finally, a long bug fix table is listed. "Purdy recalls.

Security has brought Java to shame, and security has allowed Java to regain its new life. At the PWN20WN hacker conference, Java became the only platform that was not compromised. At 2015, Pwn20wn didn't even put Java on the attack list.

Now and in the future

Java 9 will be the first major release since Oracle was acquired. The main goal of Java 9 is to maximize modularity to help people achieve building block-style application writing.

"Our aim is to help people free themselves from the bondage of jars. "You will be very easy to deal with things that have been quite complicated in the past, such as packing." You can use only the modules you need and ignore them. "This pioneered the Java platform," Purdy added. This feature runs through the entire Java library and re-organizes dependencies in a single-dependency graph. ”

Talking about the future of Java, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, thinks, "I think the future of Java lies in the internet of things." I'd love to see Oracle and its partners focus on a fully point-to-point Java storage solution that connects the device to the enterprise backend through the gateway. If it succeeds, it will enable Java to go further in the next 20. Although there is still some way to go, I believe Java can do it. ”

Gosling's view is that "the VM is its own ecology, and all parts are connected to each other." The future of the IT world is to achieve interoperability. By effectively unifying the edge and the core, you can eliminate the hassle of separate management from inside and outside, thus getting a more powerful platform. ”

Everywhere

While many people have predicted that Java will be down, Java still plays an extremely important role in many important projects today.

Purdy points out that there is no Java, not even big data development, "Hadoop itself is written in Java." When you need to publish new features on a server cluster running MapReduce, you need to deploy dynamically, and that's what Java is good at. ”

Another Java beneficiary is Twitter. Initially, Twitter was written with Ruby on Rails, but as the number of users grew, Ror became increasingly inadequate. The downtime of fail Whale indicates that bottlenecks need to be addressed urgently. In 2012, Twitter shifted from Ror to Java and Scala, and failed whales became extinct.

It is obvious that Java not only has not become yesterday yellow, but also renewed a new vitality. Let's look at Java 9 and see what Oracle will do for the vast majority of developers.

English from: ITWorld

java--forever, twists, lows, rebirth!