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So Charles, you’re one of our senior tech leads in the Java space and the Technology
Report highlighted some of the strengths and I guess sweet spots of where Java applies
these days and you’ve just come from couple of big projects using Java. I just wanted
to get your thoughts first of all I guess where Java sits best, what sort of organisations
it fits best with. Sure. So I guess the sweet spot where Java
really shines these days is with organizations who firstly already have a big existing investment
in Java technology, they have the tools and operational processes and the people who already
know Java and also in organisations and applications where you’re talking about a high volume
of transactions and places where speed is important as well. We’re typically talking
about enterprise applications with large teams, large code bases.
And you’ve done some work around using MongoDB with Java haven’t you? What are the different
drivers? Yeah, I’ve had the opportunity to work with
Spring Data on a project, the Mongo integration, which I’ve found to be very smooth and it
also brings a lot of the ideas from some of the Rails activerecord projects as well into
the Java space. And that’s something I am seeing quite a bit more of recently is bringing
some of the ideas from other platforms and other languages into Java from, you know,
dynamic languages such as Ruby. So, if you look at some projects such as Spring Roo,
the Play framework, things like that it’s almost like you’re developing in a dynamic
language working with these tools because there’s a lot of code generation going on
behind the scenes and a lot of nice language features that, tool features that allow you
to be really productive in these tools, almost like you were working in a dynamic language.
I guess that’s one of the strong legacies of where Java’s come from and where it is
at now, and that’s the maturity of the JVM and that other languages are able to take
advantage of that mature foundation. Yeah, absolutely. Although Java as a language
itself may be in decline, the JVM as a platform is really going through somewhat of a renaissance.
There are new languages coming, it seems almost monthly there is a new language, a new JVM
language, announced. You know things such as Clojure, Scala, Extend, Kotlin, all of
these new languages that have been built on the JVM. It’s a really exciting place to
be at the moment. I guess where we started was talking about
those organizations that have that big investment into perhaps a code base, or certainly the
operational support in Java and the JVM are able to test the water a bit perhaps with
some new features on an existing application or a new application in the same environment
perhaps in some of these other languages. Yeah, absolutely and projects these days,
gone are the days when you just built an application using Java. These days it’s about choosing
the right tool for the job and it’s not uncommon to find systems where different parts
of the system are built in different languages. So you may have a Java server side with a
Ruby front end client. So you know it’s really this sort of polyglot kind of projects
that are becoming more popular now and even organisations who do have heavy investments
in Java can still start building tools, applications using these other languages and especially
if they already run on the JVM they already have the knowledge and expertise and the operational
infrastructure to support that.