Java gets a bad rap. It’s considered old-school. People say that young developers prefer Ruby on Rails and other Web-based hot stuff. True – but these aren’t bad times for Java at all.
James Governor of RedMonk wrote a post that provides several good reasons why Java is really doing quite well.
Elance shows the current demand for people with Google App Engine skills is greater than those knowledgeable about Amazon Web Services. Audrey Watters of ReadWriteCloud saw the news and posted on the topic of IT jobs as the question for our weekly poll.
The reason why Google App Engine is doing so well? It’s all about the enterprise. VMware’s Spring Platform is based upon SpringSource, which has become the dominant platform for launching Java-based apps. It now integrates with Google App Engine, a primary reason for the growing success of the platform.
Governor makes some points that are worth noting:
NoSQL is one of the hottest trends in tech right now. Many of the technologies built on the platform are written in Java. It was born on the Web but will eventually move to the enterprise.
MapReduce? It’s what Google and Yahoo use to get fast responses over large data sets. It’s built on Java. Hadoop is based on MapReduce. It has its own ecosystem developing around the technology.
And then there’s this from Governor:
Of course we’re also seeing innovation from the new hotness – thus Erlang underpins CouchDB and RIAK. But Java is certainly core to the innovation. Lets look at RabbitMQ for example – which though written in Erlang was acquired by SpringSource as a messaging engine to underpin a Java-based programming model.
Governor goes on to provide a number of other examples to make his point.
And we have to agree. Java is not dead. it still has plenty of room for innovation.
