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20040531 Monday May 31, 2004

The Java Community - its strength is in its disunity Charles responds (in a comment) to Ted's accusation that .NET's community is better than Java's.

Actually, the strength of the Java community lies in its disunity. Unity is a false strength: it's safety in numbers, but it's also a herd mentality. I suspect the drive for "strength in unity" is a reflection of Microsoft's philosophy of dominance: that the best thing for the world is if everyone just Does Things Our Way: A computer on every desk running Microsoft software. The Java community has competing infrastructure vendors. We have a raft of competing web frameworks, competing AOP frameworks, competing persistence frameworks, competing IDEs, competing heavyweight and lightweight containers. And it's this competition that makes Java such a vibrant community. Nobody's quite satisfied with what the other guy's doing: everyone wants to do better. It's also what makes us, at times, a bunch of bickering children. That does us quite a bit of harm, but I think in the long run things work out for the best.

Well said. Posted in Java at May 31 2004, 12:04:14 PM MDT 2 Comments

Comments:

There must be balance to the force. Too far towards "strength in unity" and you have no choice and pay dearly for it. Too far towards "strength in diversity/competition" and you tend towards chaos, imcompatibility, and too much choice. Somwhere in the middle you find the happy medium where prices are lowish, there's plenty of choice but always a measure of compatibility, and there can be measures of efficiency and innovation. I'm not 100% sure Java is in the happy medium, but it's a lot darn closer than Microsoft or open-source (in general) will ever be. There are pockets of personality-driven development communities in open-source that have a fairly organized structure and widespread usage, but they don't represent open-source development as a whole. Speaking of community, anyone (oh, that means you, too, Matt, this is your blog... ;-) going to JavaOne? Last day for early-bird registration. Any cool parties you can get me into? Any sessions you've earmarked as particularly interesting?

Posted by gerryg on June 01, 2004 at 05:11 PM MDT #

The same thing could be said about the modern Republican party: they have beceome loyal to each other to the point that valid criticisms are disgregarded as politically motivated tripe. "E pluribus unum" implies different voices bringing strength through their varied beliefs. I agree that .NET is weaker because of its more centralized control. The Java community has shown itself to be far more creative and even *innovative* than the .NET community. Spring, Hibernate, Ant, Struts, JUnit, and other established players were all implemented in Java, even if their philosophical underpinnings were outside any language specific realm.

Posted by James Childers on June 10, 2004 at 08:11 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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