Software: Java Increasingly Threatened by New App Dev Frameworks

Java Increasingly Threatened by New App Dev Frameworks
InfoWorld (02/21/08) Krill, Paul
Java could slip to second-tier status as a development language as rival technologies start to garner more attention. Nearly 13 years old, Java is now competing with scripting languages such as PHP, Ruby, and Microsoft's .Net. Java has been praised for its ability to run on multiple platforms through the Java Virtual Machine, and Java received most of the attention for years before being seriously challenged by .Net and open-source scripting varieties. Microsoft has since made its .Net platform a serious contender, and a November 2007 report by Info-Tech Research Group found that .Net is becoming more popular than Java. However, Java is far from obsolete. Rick Ross, president of the DZone developer community and founder of Javalobby, says that Java can be found in almost everything, including major databases and in the Web sites of large companies such as eBay, and notes that it represents a multibillion-dollar industry. Info-Tech senior research analyst George Goodall says that Microsoft has an advantage in its ability to offer a single soup-to-nuts stack that features .Net, the Exchange email system, and the SQL Server database. Info-Tech's survey of 1,900 companies, mostly midmarket companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues, found that 12 percent of enterprises focus exclusively on .Net while only 3 percent focus only on Java. Additionally, 49 percent center primarily on .Net, while 20 percent center on Java. The survey did find that .Net popularity decreases very gradually as the size of the enterprise increases, but that the decreased popularity of .Net does not come from an increase in Java, but rather a preference for other development platforms in heterogeneous environments.
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