The Top 10 Reasons why Java Rocks More Than Ever

ZeroTurnaround’s RebelLabs often publish awesome blog posts, which we can only recommend. In this case, we’ve discovered a very well-written series of blog posts explaining why Java is so great in 10 steps, by ZeroTurnaround’s Geert Bevin. The articles include:

The compiler is one of the things we take for granted in any language, without thinking about its great features. In Java, unlike C++, you can simply compile your code without thinking too much about linking, optimisation and all sorts of other usual compiler features. This is partially due to the JIT (Just In Time compiler), which does further compilation work at runtime.

The JDK’s core API consists of a very solid, stable and well-understood set of libraries. While many people complain about the lack of functionality in this area (resorting to Google Guava or Apache Commons), people often forget that the core API is still the one that is underneath all those extensions. Again, from a C++ perspective, this is a truly luxurious situation.

In this section, ZeroTurnaround’s Geert Bevin‘s mind-set aligns well with our own at Data Geekerywhen it comes to the spirit of Open Source – no matter whether this is about free-as-in-freedom, or free-as-in-beer, the point is that so many things about Java are “open”. We’re all in this together.

Again, a very interesting point of view from someone with a solid C++ background. We’re taking many things for granted as Java has had a very good threading and memory model from the beginning, which was corrected only once in the JDK 1.5 in 2004, and which has built a solid grounds for newer API like actor-based ones, Fork/JOIN, etc.

The JVM is the most obvious thing to talk about it has allowed for so many languages to work on so many hardware environments, and it runs so fast, nowadays!

… and the JVM also rocks because of bytecode, of course. Bytecode is a vendor-independent abstraction of machine code, which is very predictable and can be generated, manipulated, and transformed by various technologies. We’ve recently had a guest post by Dr. Ming-Yee Iu who has shown how bytecode transformations can be used to emulate LINQ in Java. Let’s hear it for bytecode!

15 years ago, developing software worked quite differently. People can write assembler or C programs with vi or Notepad. But when you’re writing a very complex enterprise-scale Java program, you wouldn’t want to miss IDEs, nowadays. We’ve blogged about various reasons why SQLJ has died. The lack of proper IDE support was one of them.

Remember when Oracle released Java Mission Control for free developer use with the JDK 7u40?Profiling is something very very awesome. With modern profilers, you can know exactly where your bottleneck is by simply measuring every aspect of your JVM. You don’t have to guess, you can know. How powerful is that?

While backwards-compatibility has its drawbacks, too, it is still very impressive how long the Java language, the JVM, and the JDK have existed so far without introducing any major backwards-compatibility regressions. The only thing that comes to mind is the introduction of keywords like assertand enum.

Could you imagine introducing the Java 8 Streams API, lambda expressions, default methods, generics, enums, and loads of other features without ever breaking anything? That’s just great!

In fact, this article is a summary of all the others, saying that Java has been a very well-designed and mature platform from the beginning without ever ceasing to innovate. And it’s true. With Java 8, a great next step has been published that will – again – change the way the enterprise perceives software development for good.

It does, and it’s a great great platform with a bright future for all its community participants