An appeal: Java Developers lets make peace…

Things have heated up recently in different Java forums with wide ranging topics.

A case in point -
JBoss, for example, is a company which people love to adore or hate. Frankly I haven’t worked with JBoss, however I can tell you about Weblogic when it was Tengah. And it had major league problems, to say the least. However nobody thought of being acerbic as today people are with JBoss. If you like it you use it, if not just ditch it for many other alternatives like Orion, IBM Websphere, Pramati, Weblogic etc., some free, some not. However lets not forget that it is a major effort in making an application server Open Source.

Let us understand that we are all in this together, to make and use better tools which makes us more productive, allows us to serve the customer better and last but not the least gives us a better programming experience.

Look at the MVC and other frameworks scene. There are multitudes of framework starting from Struts, Spring, velocity, Tapestry, WebWork, Thinlet and scores of others. I was looking at many of them and came to the conclusion that they are not much different. Some of them have some redeeming feature; others are just a different way of doing things. Why can’t we all work together, take the best features and create one or at most two framework which caters to 95 % of the users?

These people do not seem to be communicating much with each other at all, except to find out how theirs is superior! I mean you are not even making any money on this, why not just work together to create something better for the users, instead of stoking your ego?

BTW: One of the downside of open-source is that anyone with half-baked idea feels free to create a framework (or anything for that matter) and subject people through suffering for it.

Again please come together, use your combined talents to give us something better.

I often check out BileBlog and I have to say it is amusing at times. However I do not like the language and it has a definite potential to fragment the Java community with a lot of bile. Spread some love too (just the platonic kind) Hani

In the past I have pointed out shortcomings of JUnit and other products. However the intention and language was always as friendly criticism, impetus to improve things better. Recently I have been exchanging several emails with NailGun author with the sole purpose of improving his product. And I am sure most of you are doing much much better than I can even dream of. However the rest of us need to realize what’s at stake.

As a community we need to stick together and not fight like kids with “My blah blah is better than yours” mentality. We need to help each other out.

.Net developers seem to be a friendly bunch. In comparison we almost look like rowdy’s fighting for turf.

We have so many distractions! Today someone comes and declares that real hackers code using php; tomorrow some lame excuse of a benchmark says that .Net is better than J2EE.

And there are always the php kiddies of SlashDot who loves to hate Java because they just cannot get it how people could write object-oriented code when some perl or php scripts/hacks would do the job. And honorable mention goes to Linux zealots too on these issues. The sad part is that Java & Linux makes a very good team and MALJ is possibly a far better concoction than LAMP in most situations.
Note: This is not intended towards most of the developers of either community but just few zealots in each of them.

Now if .Net or php (its just a interpreted language so a comparison isn’t even fair to php) were really better than Java I would have switched first by all means possible. Truth is it isn’t. However trust me it doesn’t take much FUD to convince your Boss that VB.NET is the next best thing since sliced bread and for him to make the dictat that all programming henceforth will have to use VB.NET. Unless you are looking for it, wise up.

And Rick from JavaLobby, please refrain from your campaign to “free Java”. Java is as free as it gets and we are happy with it. In case you are not, there is always C# & J# & VB.Net. I would love to see you campaigning to set those languages free. But please leave us alone on this issue. We like you for your effort to sustain Java based efforts like JRoller & MyCGIServlet. We know you have good intention at hurt. But it hurts our interest more as community with your constant criticism of Sun. If Sun goes down, it is very bad news for Java. And frankly Open Source is not the silver bullet. If you count the number of open source projects in existence and the no. of successful ones, I am sure you will find that less than 1% of it are of any worth and that 1% includes Linux, Apache Web Server, Tomcat, Ant and few others.
I am happy if Sun makes some money from Java so as to sustain their business interests.

J2EE & JDO groups - can you please stop fighting?

And Sun please stop harassing websites with the name Java in their names, yes I am talking about JavaGeeks. You have already harassed enough people. I understand why you want to protect your trademarks, however do a cost-benefit analysis. The cost is alienating a large segment of the user community and the benefit is that people cannot make products like JavaBlah, except you!
And now that you are in friendship with Microsoft is it such a big deal? It may be in your better interests to let Java be used more widely and be part of the jargon. The users of Java can increase its reach where you cannot even imagine.

And the sad part is that the above incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.

We need to get back in the help-each-other-mode like we were in the early years of java. Lets take the language and environment to the next phase where it becomes the de-facto language of choice.

Cheers,
Angsuman

PS. On a side note it is very inviting to see the seductive posts by Ruby community to get people in their fold, they spread a lot of love

PPS. I have gone back to moderating the posts because of phentermine and mortgage ads, so it may take a day before it appears. If you still do not find it, please post again. It can happen because I may have missed your post between tons of phentermine and mortgage ads.

PPPS. Added some link-love to the post.