This article was written to those who still think that the JVM equals Java and that in turn means “enterprise”. If you already understand this isn’t true, you can ignore this text below. With that clarified, let’s move on!

What is Java?

One of the first things people say when they hear the word Java is to complain over how “slow” it is. While that might have been true at some point in time, it certainly doesn’t ring true now. Far from it. It’s just one of many myths Java still hasn’t shook off. But when referring to Java we often mean the entire Java platform. Yes, Java is a platform that includes the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the Java language and the APIs (the JDK).

Often cited as an unbreakable trinity, those three aren’t inseparable. Quite the opposite. During the last five years people have realized that the virtual machine is capable of so much more than running Java. In hindsight one could argue that this was a failure by Sun to market this trio as “Java” instead of dividing them. So instead of focusing on...
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In a timely fashion, as we’re closing the end of this year, I would like the opportunity to make some predictions for the coming year. Being keen on web related technologies, these claims will almost exclusively be centered around this.

Last year’s predictions

I had a peek at what I predicted for 2009 and I would say it held true for every one. The list from last year said that document-oriented databases, cloud applications, functional languages and XMPP will come around. And surely, they did. Erlang, Scala and Clojure made great advancements together with document-oriented databases, such as CouchDB and MongoDB. XMPP finally gotten its acceptance through Google Wave. Perhaps predicting that more applications would be cloud-based was a no-brainer. Despite that, 2009 was the year I stopped fiddling with MP3s, stopped worrying about e-mail and trusted my source code to a third party.

Ok, enough retrospectives.

Taking a stab at what 2010 will bring for us, would in my opinion be:

Server-side JavaScripting

The idea that you actually could run JavaScript not only in the browser but also server-side isn’t that revolutionizing. However,...
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I have been for the past weeks been thinking about the (broken) state of popular languages. Not that the languages themselves are fundamentally broken, no, not like that. Rather, the state of their lousy virtual machines. The machines that actually hinder their adoption. Paradoxical? Well, let me tell you.

Many developers are afraid of adopting young technologies and languages/VMs are no exception. Actually, requirements are even stricter with these type of products. Getting rid of a error-prone VM which is usually heavily tied to language implementation isn’t easy. People tend to think twice about the decision. Also, switching VMs usually requires the operations team to maintain and operate the legacy parts after you make the switch.

Second problem with all these DIY VMs is that they are slow. Painfully slow sometimes, often resorting to C to speed things. Ok, that’s fine you think. I don’t have to deal with that. “Other people” will provide me with speedy libraries of things I usually do. JSON encoding, image manipulation, database interaction and so on. And that is what has happened to Ruby and Python. Luckily, people actually spent the time creating these libraries for the rest of us. However, you find out...
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First placeholder post here. Will hopefully put some of my thoughts into words here on this blog. If you’re curious about me, read more on the about page.