The boogeyman that drives Java EE
It’s weird, but two years or so ago, I remember that the number of posts on .NET in Javablogs was quite large. This was a couple years after Alan Williamson’s portentous “Java will be dead in 5 years” article in Java Developer’s Journal, and this big bad boogeyman obviously gave many nightmares to the inhabitants of Javaland.
Now, instead of panicked blogs about Redmond’s tamed Java alternative, we get panicked (and angry) blogs about the double R word.
It must be said that the Java ME world is only slightly better, mostly because the ubiquity and dominance of Java in this world, at least in the consumer markets, is almost without parallel. And yet there were noises made about .NET compact framework once, and before that it was BREW that caused ice to form in the hearts of Java Jihadists. Today, there is some slight fear of Flash Lite, although this is tempered by the realization that the situation of Java ME is nowhere near that of Java applets in the late 1990s.
It’s a common theme in human nature that unless there is some external factor that incites fear, progress stalls, and I guess this is why Java nuts aren’t really happy unless there’s some boogeyman to drive the continued development of the enterprise platform.
Plus, what would Javablogs be without the incessant blogs about the end of Java. As the old saying goes, light-hearted and happy musical films sell, but horror films sell even better.