Re:Oracle and the fall of Java EE
by bitL on Friday July 08, 2016 @10:19AM
(#12055671)
Java was the original .NET. Read history of Sun vs Microsoft. C# was a result of a merger of Java + Delphi, visual .NET components are based on Borland's VCL design. Many Java developers were extremely allergic to MS and the vibe at that time was "freedom", especially from nasty companies. Java also got its foothold in finance institutions due to easier design of distributed and transactional systems than the prevailing super difficult CORBA which propelled its rise everywhere. If you look at distributed systems, Java is still the king there.
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There were also several large business sectors that ran almost exclusively Sun hardware. Like the wireless industry 10 years ago. The first project I worked on at scale had to run on Solaris or they wouldn't talk to you.
And our log files had to be localized, which while Java is not perfect, few if any string interpolation libraries match it for being able to deal with written languages that have a different sentence structure than English. It was hard work and one of my coworkers had to invent a new linter to detect unlocalized text in our code, but I couldn't imagine fulfilling those requirements in another language.