Re:Ask HN: Why does the enterprise have such a strong affini...
by filmgirlcw on Saturday July 26, 2014 @06:28PM
(#8091050)
Great point about the y2k but. My aunt was a systems engineer at CSX and was one of the people that led their Y2K group (partially because she was one of the only people they had employed that was still expertly proficient in COBOL) and a lot of what she did, in addition to fixing the COBOL bits, was rewrite stuff in Java and build out Java connectors.
It's funny, I remember learning J++ in 1998 when I was like 15, around the same time she was knee-deep in the y2k thing. And we would email an call one another commiserating, because she was learning Java too (albeit at a much higher level and with real stakes).
As shitty as Java is for a lot of things, it is a godsend for dealing with legacy apps and code. And the thing is, those legacy systems are some of the most important systems around (banking, transpiration, health care records, major utilities like water and power, etc).
If I ever need to give myself nightmares, I just start to contemplate the infrastructure of our most important entities.
And it's not all about IBM either. Obviously Oracle, another enterprise favorite, is playing in the Java space these days and provide an application server, WebLogic, along with great support for accessing Oracle's RDBMs from Java. Oracle also has several industry vertical solutions all based on Java.
Finally there's Red Hat. Lots of enterprises run RHEL when running a Linux server and their JBoss application server is highly regarded.
Java then offers enterprises a lot of flexibility. There's multiple vendors from which they can choose to procure application servers, there's little risk of platform lock-in, they can fully interoperate with legacy applications and there's a ton of reasonable cost developers available - who are mostly happy with a language that's fairly modern. There's actually quite a bit for an enterprise to like about Java.