Leveraging Java in Developing Countries

Java is the No. 1 language on planet earth, high performing and very easy to use. Developers can jumpstart with a rich set of free libraries bundled with JDK and get extensive community support through local JUG’s and the community in general.

In this article we will look at few ideas on leveraging Java in developing countries.

Outsourcing
Outsourcing constitutes the bulk of software revenue (and even the GDP) in developing countries. With the strong position of Java as development language and also due to its platform-independent and web-centric nature, it is widely used in outsourced software projects. Educating computer science students in Java can help local companies capture and consolidate this segment.

Product development
Java is free for all practical purposes. Java developers do not have to think about purchasing license for their Operating system (use Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris etc.), development environment, platform, IDE (use Eclipse, Netbeans etc.) or distribution, unlike developers on Microsoft Windows platform.

Licensing fees are a major deterrent in product development in developing countries. As a result piracy is common. However you cannot sell software based upon pirated environment and without appropriate distribution license. The risks are too high. You have to therefore choose free platform like Java. Java comes with plethora of choices for IDE, frameworks (too many of them IMHO) and best of all it runs on all platform, including but not limited to Windows.

Leveraging Java can boost product development initiatives in developing countries.

Government Agencies
Government agencies can leverage Java platform with Linux for developing enterprise class applications for providing better service to citizens at low price. They do not have to pay for licenses, have full access to the source code and have the capability to support legacy systems.

Health care
Health care and medical insurance can be easily streamlined with Java based web applications. Today most of the software in health care industry in India are based on DOS platform. Most of them are basic and sits in islands of their own with no interlinking (networking support). Java based web applications can easily change the scenario and enable better and seamless health care.