Java, Pain, and Low Productivity
There is a widespread feeling in the Java Community that there is something seriously wrong with Java web apps. They are much too hard to build and maintain. Below are some typical comments which illustrate this widely held opinion. WEB4J was built in response to this issue, and it claims to demonstrate that the problem lies not in the language, but rather with inadequate, overly complex frameworks.
Quotes from the community :
I think a lot of [the recent excitement regarding scripting languages]
has to do with just pure pain. [People] have been developing now in languages and frameworks,
which started out simple, started out elegant, and then gradually just accreted more and more stuff around
them - to the point where now I don't even know how a beginner J2EE developer gets started, because the stack
of books you have to read just to write a simple J2EE application it's probably 5-6 feet tall and it's a
lot of work just to get in there...
"I think Java, for the simple applications, is in trouble.
I see Rails as a fix to the major problem we solve most often: web enabling a relational database. For that
space, Java's productivity sucks....What's most alarming to me is this: Java's not solving the problems of the majority of its user base. If not
Rails, something else will step into that gap."
"The pain of dealing with Java, and the time/effort it takes to develop using it just isn't worth it to me.
Yes, at one point Java was definitely a god-send. It rescued me from the Microsoft hell I was dealing
with at the time .... But many years have passed since then, and sadly Java hasn't progressed, and instead has become
more and more obtuse and bloated with each passing year. At one point I thought I hated programming because
I was just so sick of it... It turns out I don't hate programming, I just hate programming in Java.
...There's something about the Java culture which just seems to encourage obtuse solutions over simplicity."
"The Java tool stack and runtime stack - this is incredibly complicated. There are at least 50 acronyms.
Even with the best tooling, if you have such a complicated technology or stack of technology, it will
always remain very difficult to build apps."
"One thing that a lot of people don't get, is that you can do what makes Rails successful in any language: the
key is keeping it simple, don't over architect it, start small, slowly build on..."
"If folks in the Java space spent as much time designing easy-to-comprehend-and-use frameworks as the Ruby
community does, Ruby on Rails wouldn't be making such big waves."
"Now, I've said that you can't do Rails in Java. That doesn't mean that you couldn't do something equally as cool
in Java. The strengths of Java could be applied to a brand new framework in interesting and amazing ways. It's just
that nobody has done that yet. Everybody has been too interested in chasing the J2EE cookie to rethink the
problem in a drastic and dynamic way. But even if somebody does come up with a killer Java-based web framework
that does as much as Rails, it certainly won't look or feel like Rails."