Software: Java Is Becoming the New Cobol

Java Is Becoming the New Cobol
InfoWorld (12/28/07) Snyder, Bill
Java is becoming less popular with developers as many are switching to Ruby on Rails, PHP, AJAX, and Microsoft's .Net to develop rich Internet applications. Many developers feel that Java slows them down. Peter Thoneny, CEO of Twiki.net, which produces a certified version of the open source Twiki wiki-platform software, says Java promised to solve incompatibility problems across platforms, but the different versions and different downloads of Java are creating complications. Ofer Ronen, CEO of Sendori, which routes domain traffic to online advertisers and ad networks, says languages such as Ruby offer pre-built structures such as shopping carts that would have to be built from scratch with Java. Zephyr CEO Samir Shah says Java's user-interface capabilities and memory footprint simply do not measure up and put it at a serious disadvantage in regards to mobile application development. Nevertheless, developers and analysts agree that Java is still going strong in internally developed enterprise apps. "On the back end, there is still a substantial amount of infrastructure available that makes Java a very strong contender," Shah says.
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