O’Reilly is celebrating the release of Java 7, and our inaugural OSCON Java conference: July 25-27 in Portland, Ore.
Java’s back, baby. Of course, lots of us never stopped using Java in the first place, or perhaps we weren’t allowed to. But where platform selection was elective, especially among startups and web developers, alternative platforms have offered more agility and expressiveness over the last 10 years. The likes of PHP and Ruby on Rails enable developers to do a whole lot more with less.
Times change, and 16 years on, this ain’t your father’s Java. Here’s seven reasons you should take another look at Java.
1. You can actually hire engineers
Not to be sniffed at when your Node. js Ninjas and Rails Rockstars get headhunted into the latest impossibly well-funded startup.
2. IDEs take the pain away
Eclipse and NetBeans are astonishingly powerful tools, and can mask some of the admitted horror that is Java API soup. Bend like a reed, admit you can’t know everything, and float downstream on the good ship autocomplete.
3. Language support
You don’t have to write Java to use Java. You can get all the benefits of the portable JVM runtime but scribble away in the familiar environs of Ruby or Python. It can be faster too. And that’s not to mention the newer languages aimed at modern programming such as Scala, Groovy or Clojure.
4. Android
Who can resist the little green robot? Google made a sensible choice when they chose the Java language to power what’s becoming the world’s dominant mobile phone platform. So, maybe Oracle has a billion-dollar beef with this, but programmers – new and seasoned alike – are picking up Java as mobile becomes the future of consumer software.
5. Everybody else does
Java’s ecosystem is a goldmine. Pretty much everything you want to do, there’s a library for it. Actually, there’s probably an Apache project for it. Very often the lowest impedance way to speak to the rest of the world is via a Java API.
6. It changes slowly
We’re celebrating the release of Java 7 right now. It’s been two years in the making, and frankly, there’s not a whole lot that’s changed for most people. If you can take your finger off the refresh button at Hacker News for more than an hour, any software that lives longer than a year becomes a real pain to maintain when the underlying platform keeps changing. Yes, looking at you, Rails.
7. You’ll end up using it anyway
At a certain point you’ll need performance, predictability and a ready supply of engineers. Scaling, deploying and programming to the cloud are places where Java excels. Twitter found this out, and will be talking about it at OSCON Java.
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