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For me, it's purely emotional. My last class at Uni 2 years ago was a survey of web dev technologies. We built sites using ASP.NET, Perl, PHP and JSP. Java a

For me, it's purely emotional. My last class at Uni 2 years ago was a survey of web dev technologies. We built sites using ASP.NET, Perl, PHP and JSP. Java and asp.net were tied for worst experience ever. Setup and configuration of the Java stack was 2/3rds of the project. And, that's after taking 2 years of Java in school. Setting up a Java stack on a Ubuntu or a Windows box was equally as painful for me at the time. My experience at school as made me loathe to try anything Java related. And, while I love the idea of the jvm, I have a pretty visceral emotional reaction to anything java related. I know it's wrong, but I can't even bring myself to do the installation required to mess around with Clojure or Scala. I get the same vibe from a number of young developers I come across at Hackers and Founders SV meetups that have recently graduated from school. Someone mentions Java at our meetups and everyone at the table groans. Python and Ruby are essentially lingua franca here in Silicon Valley startup culture, with C and C++ mixed in for speed. I've settled on Python/Django for day to day dev work. In my case, even though Clojure and Scala look really sexy. The thought of installing a jvm based development environment makes me break out into a cold sweat. If I'm going to play around with a "sexy" language to learn stuff I'm going to play with Haskell, Erlang, or O'Caml, just to avoid using the jvm.

rikthevik 16y ago
Check out leiningen! It was made for people who are allergic to configuring the java stack.
rit 16y ago
What's the big deal with setting up a "JVM Environment"? Working with Scala for me involves the latest Scala distro and a copy of VIM. Is there something in particular that makes it so painful that I"m missing?
- davelnewton 16y ago
  Yes--there's more to setting up a JEE stack then getting a JVM and a language running.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    I sometimes do "yum install tomcat6; sudo rctomcat6 start; emacs foo.jsp" just to dink around with the odd corners of the servlet API (I'd do it in Eclipse if it weren't such a pig). You can just ignore a lot of the painful ceremony that JEE wants to inflict on you.
    - davelnewton 16y ago
      Sure, if you don't need it. The bulk of my JEE work is somewhat more complex than "dinking around with the odd corners of the servlet API".
  - democracy 16y ago
    jee stack is a set of specifications, you never "install it" or "set it up"
russell 16y ago
Agreed on the emotional. I have worked on several JSP sites that are 5 or 10 years old. In every case the JSP code is terrible. In all there was not a clear understanding of the MVC model. Sure there was some MVC handwaving, but for the most part there was a lot of java code doing bits of this and that which should be in the model. Another problem is the 5 to 15 minute compile, deploy, restart the server cycle. And the nasty use of XML to integrate the half dozen frameworks which are never consistent from client to client. All of this is a huge blow to productivity.
etherael 16y ago
java stack in ubuntu can be installed mostly via apt-get, ie jdk + netbeans. I guess it depends on which particular jvm framework you're talking about on top of that as to how dicey it gets but for grails it's as simple as installing groovy, grails and the netbeans plugin for dev. I've had no more issues with configuring a grails stack than configuring a rails or django stack, are you referring to some other kind of java framework here?

rikthevik 16y ago

Check out leiningen! It was made for people who are allergic to configuring the java stack.

rit 16y ago

What's the big deal with setting up a "JVM Environment"? Working with Scala for me involves the latest Scala distro and a copy of VIM. Is there something in particular that makes it so painful that I"m missing?

davelnewton 16y ago
Yes--there's more to setting up a JEE stack then getting a JVM and a language running.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  I sometimes do "yum install tomcat6; sudo rctomcat6 start; emacs foo.jsp" just to dink around with the odd corners of the servlet API (I'd do it in Eclipse if it weren't such a pig). You can just ignore a lot of the painful ceremony that JEE wants to inflict on you.
  - davelnewton 16y ago
    Sure, if you don't need it. The bulk of my JEE work is somewhat more complex than "dinking around with the odd corners of the servlet API".
- democracy 16y ago
  jee stack is a set of specifications, you never "install it" or "set it up"

russell 16y ago

Agreed on the emotional. I have worked on several JSP sites that are 5 or 10 years old. In every case the JSP code is terrible. In all there was not a clear understanding of the MVC model. Sure there was some MVC handwaving, but for the most part there was a lot of java code doing bits of this and that which should be in the model. Another problem is the 5 to 15 minute compile, deploy, restart the server cycle. And the nasty use of XML to integrate the half dozen frameworks which are never consistent from client to client. All of this is a huge blow to productivity.

etherael 16y ago

java stack in ubuntu can be installed mostly via apt-get, ie jdk + netbeans. I guess it depends on which particular jvm framework you're talking about on top of that as to how dicey it gets but for grails it's as simple as installing groovy, grails and the netbeans plugin for dev. I've had no more issues with configuring a grails stack than configuring a rails or django stack, are you referring to some other kind of java framework here?