Re:Free for students: Professional developer tools from JetB...
by paulmd on Monday October 31, 2016 @12:39PM
(#12838442)
> What happened is that Java EE was a beast to work with, but some features of it like servlets, injection, and data mappings were useful, so developers built versions of those that could work with Java SE (think Tomcat and Spring). The Java team took the lessons and redid Java EE to make it easier to work with. It's still a bit of a beast to work with, but good enough to build an application with.
This is a really important point for all of Java, in fact. It's a fairly old language (21 years) that has had a lot of trial-and-error and a lot of very niche applications (embedded/mobile development). There is a lot of stuff that is abandoned, obscure, deprecated, or not really used for its original purposes anymore.
For example of something that's widely acknowledged as an outright mistake, see the Cloneable interface.
Do also see the DEFCON talk "The Secret Life Of SIM Cards" that was posted here last night, for an example of a niche embedded usage of Java. There is a LOT of Java running around - not just on smartphones, but on all kinds of embeddable/mobile devices.
In many ways DotNet is a clean-slate reimplementation of what Java could have been. It avoids many of the pitfalls that Java ran into, but I think it also misses the boat on some others. I would love a Maven equivalent for C#. And checked exceptions actually are useful in some contexts and C# misses out, but on the other hand Java took it way too far by adding tons and tons of checked exceptions for generic "something happened!" failure cases, many of which are implementation errors and should be unchecked. C# has a lot less boilerplate but also more opportunity for mistakes if you aren't careful.
This is a really important point for all of Java, in fact. It's a fairly old language (21 years) that has had a lot of trial-and-error and a lot of very niche applications (embedded/mobile development). There is a lot of stuff that is abandoned, obscure, deprecated, or not really used for its original purposes anymore.
For example of something that's widely acknowledged as an outright mistake, see the Cloneable interface.
http://www.artima.com/intv/issues3.html
Do also see the DEFCON talk "The Secret Life Of SIM Cards" that was posted here last night, for an example of a niche embedded usage of Java. There is a LOT of Java running around - not just on smartphones, but on all kinds of embeddable/mobile devices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-nxemBCcmU
In many ways DotNet is a clean-slate reimplementation of what Java could have been. It avoids many of the pitfalls that Java ran into, but I think it also misses the boat on some others. I would love a Maven equivalent for C#. And checked exceptions actually are useful in some contexts and C# misses out, but on the other hand Java took it way too far by adding tons and tons of checked exceptions for generic "something happened!" failure cases, many of which are implementation errors and should be unchecked. C# has a lot less boilerplate but also more opportunity for mistakes if you aren't careful.