[Biojava-l] Java Resource Management [a semi troll...]
Simon Brocklehurst
simon.brocklehurst at cambridgeantibody.com
Mon Feb 10 11:00:52 EST 2003
Ewan Birney wrote:
Ewan,
The issues in that memo are real. Are those *really* the reasons for
your reluctance to move to Java? Are you sure it's not more of a "not
wanting to start all over again" kind of learning issue?
I remember very well when I switched from C to Java in 1997, it was
pretty painful. This was not so much the state of Java back then, but
more of "how can I live without pointer arithmetic?", "how the hell do I
convert a string to a float?" type of issues...
>
> For guys who do run Java as part of their production code in
> bioinformatics,
>
> (a) do you have versioning problems over time?
Oh yes - there are many problems relating to different versions of Java
(including the same dot release of VMs on different hardware/OS
platforms)! However, we've never *not* been able to find a solution to
these when they hit, and they're not usually too expensive to deal with
either. We have production systems running today that use code-bases
that are five years old.
> (b) are there resource problems or not?
>
There's not a single answer to this - depends on the type of system.
Currently there are no significant resource issues us. RAM resource
problems for GUI systems running on the desktop went away (in the main)
four or five years ago. At that time, typical desktop only had 32 MB
RAM. On the server, resource problems have never been a amjor issue for
us. In general, you certainly don't need "really beefy" machines to run
Java systems on.
So, the bottom line is - Java isn't even close to being perfect. But
then neither are: C/C++; Perl; Python; .NET; any other programming
language/platform.
Taking everything into account right now, Java is probably the best
platform for efficient development of high performance, rock-solid
computer systems with complex architectures?
That's not to say that it's *easy* to build systems like this in Java -
it's not - it's hard. It's just that it's much, much easier in Java than
anything else. Hence, most of the planet uses Java to build such systems.
Simon
--
Dr Simon M. Brocklehurst, Ph.D.
Director of Informatics & Robotics
Cambridge Antibody Technology
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