Java, the Cobol of the 90's?

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Quinton Wall's Blog | December 5, 2007   5:44 AM | Comments (0)

I have said it before and I will say it again, in my opinion Java is the cobol of the 90's! Yes thats pretty harsh words especially for someone who works for a product company that build their applications in Java but I believe it is true. So as the sting begins to subside from that statement let me explain the shades of gray in the statement and premise the conversation with the note that Java is still fundamentally important but in a different context.

I was in a session this morning presented by Yefim Natis, Gartner VP where he was speaking about the future of application platforms. During this session Yefim much more eloquently than my statement above how application servers as we know it are becoming a commodity and we will begin to see parallel product offerings that support more agile frameworks such as spring (just in case you didnt know WLS 10 already supports Spring!) and going forward there will be a delineation between lightweight java (Spring etc), JEE, and Java Extreme Processing. This is where we get into the meat of where my statement above starts to ring true. Cobol traditionally has been reliable, stable and around for years, Java is moving that way too. This is evidenced by the declining release schedules of J2EE and JEE. I was around when we got a new version every few months. JavaEE is now a commodity no doubt about it. Lightweight Java; Spring, Hibernate etc will continue to drive enterprise innovation but I believe even those technologies will soon be swallowed by dynamic languages such as Rudy and PHP and way cool frameworks like Flex and Apollo for what they are good at; agile web applications.

Now there is the rub. Java is great at certain things which are especially critical to higher transaction and concurrent applications which happen to be BEA's traditional sweetspot. With the evolving SaaS environment growing rapidly languages such as Java will likely play a heavy lifting role behind the scenes and will continue to use products like WebLogic Integration, ALSB etc but users will be sheltered from the complexity of using them (IMO through Rudy, PHP, AJAX and Web2.0 related technologies).

Sounds kind of similar to cobol still running on mainframes and new innovation being done in more modern technologies doesn't it?

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