{"id":574,"date":"2009-03-22T16:52:59","date_gmt":"2009-03-22T23:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=574"},"modified":"2009-03-23T17:14:53","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T00:14:53","slug":"everything-thats-wrong-with-java","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2009\/03\/22\/everything-thats-wrong-with-java\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything that’s wrong with Java"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in the process of learning the Java Spring<\/a> web framework (motto: there’s nothing another XML configuration file can’t fix). This has turned out to be a bit of an exercise in frustration: I have always had trouble dealing with Java tech because of their jargon-filled docs. Actually, it’s not even the jargon per se<\/i>, it’s that the jargon is all Java-specific.<\/p>\n

An example: the term “servlet container”. A “servlet container” is a web server that can run a servlet. That’s all. There’s no need for a new term: just say “web server that can run a servlet” or even “servlet implementation” and you’ve removed a whole layer of jargon that people have to learn.<\/p>\n

As I was exploring Hibernate (which can integrate with Spring) today, I went to the Hibernate home page<\/a> and realized I had another example of why I hate the Java ecosystem. Their front page contains this description of what Hibernate is:<\/p>\n

Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object\/relational persistence and query service. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom – including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well… I suppose that’s pretty informative if you’re willing to parse through the overly-dense sentence structure and already know how the Java world uses all those terms. And, the page contains this diagram:<\/p>\n

\"hibernate_stacks\"<\/p>\n

Riiiiight. That totally clears things up. Perfect for first-time visitors.<\/p>\n

Now, compare a similar (but admittedly less-powerful) Python technology: the home page for SQLObject<\/a>. They have this description:<\/p>\n

SQLObject is a popular Object Relational Manager<\/em> for providing an object interface to your database, with tables as classes, rows as instances, and columns as attributes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more clear and concise description of ORM<\/a> than that. It’s followed by a dozen-line code example of how to work with SQLObject in Python which more-or-less demonstrates exactly what the tool does, how it does it, and what it can be used for.<\/p>\n

Basically, the message I get from the Hibernate front page: “boy, this sure looks enterprisey<\/a>“. From SQLObject: “oh, I see what this tool is for”.<\/p>\n

Just to be a little constructive, let me take a shot at rewriting the Hibernate intro:<\/p>\n

Hibernate is a powerful Object-Relational Mapper<\/em> for Java: it lets you save object instances as rows in a relational database, and retrieve them later. Hibernate supports most object-oriented programming techniques, including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, that’s off my chest. Bring on the Java fanboys…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m in the process of learning the Java Spring web framework (motto: there’s nothing another XML configuration file can’t fix). This has turned out to be a bit of an exercise in frustration: I have always had trouble dealing with Java tech because of their jargon-filled docs. Actually, it’s not even the jargon per se, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-tech","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":584,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}