Dynamic languages for web development vs Java
From a recent blog post:
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The simple truth is that for web applications dynamic approaches are massively more productive. Take a look at Seaside (Smalltalk), Grails (groovy) or Rails (Ruby) and its clear that Java has nothing to compare. The DSLs provided by these languages make web development a cinch. Productivity improvements of 2-3 times is not uncommon. This translates to a reduced time to market, and better responsiveness to business needs.
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The domains where Java makes sense are shrinking. Given the performance of dynamic languages nowadays and the ability to inter-operate with high performance system languages like C++, I see Java and C# being squeezed.
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I couldn't have said it better. Go read the rest of the article, including the linked article where the Java people continue to spread FUD.
Comments
All our applications were built on Smalltalk, now they are Java based. Why someone that loves Smalltalk is a heavy Java user? you may ask. Everything in this world need compromises. I partialy agree with how easy is to write web applications using dynamic languages, but saying that Java has nothing to compare is not fare, you can see for example http://seamframework.org/
Everyone that say "..better responsiveness to business needs.." really has a small view of what is business. maybe his/her business is based on providing only a web service, but the majority just ignore that a lot of software developers are people building enterprise applications, those that requires Transaction Managers, to access multiple datasources on the same transaction, that need to build web interfaces and rich clients/traditional GUI
Why we replaced Smalltalk as our primary development language, no standard/cross platform GUI toolkit, no portability between VM implementations (ANSI Smalltalk is too limited for real world applications). My dream development environment, Smalltalk running on top the Java VM, taking advantage of all the Java services/APIs (backed by hardware/software providers). I have faith on the recent Sun push on dynamic languages (including VM changes to make that easy)