Java is Java.next(); I jumped on the java bandwagon a few months ago, but fully committed to it for work just in the last month (long story, sole/lead/CTO for

Java is Java.next(); I jumped on the java bandwagon a few months ago, but fully committed to it for work just in the last month (long story, sole/lead/CTO for fashion house with tens of retail outlets. Ass needed to be covered, and we're doing 30% Android, so might as well go fully java.) Yeah, it's doable. In fact, it's tasty. Eclipse integrates really well with it. Java EE is better than I expected: I would kill to have hibernate/JPA for Lisp, to be honest. I tried a few web frameworks but decided to use Play, which is absolutely delicious. If you have any substantial "backend development" you will cream your pants at how much "process" & good workflow the Java ecosystem embodies. Right click -> Run As -> Deploy on Server. There ya go, then you get a bunch consoles to monitor your apps and get some fine grained stats. You can hook a debugger to remote process, if you need that too. I implemented RBAC security, database auditing & roll-back (at the ORM level, zero SQL), object validation, the whole admin crud, and a REST API in 2-3 weeks. Having never done it in Java before. Dependency injection is one of those opaque jargons that don't make any sense until you do a bit of Java. Then it's the most awesome thing you ever heard of. Modern Java is not like the Java of old. It's all clean classes, a few conventions (yes, they discovered "convention over configuration" and the annotations make everything a breeze), and the rest are just rock solid servers and software. I can safely say that XML is 100% optional. I have yet to write any of it. Nearly everything is done with var=val type configuration files. Once you get the hang of it you discover you have a world of possibilities. I'm pretty much spoiled for choices. Not necessarily "fun" and "hackish", but it's very productive (it doesn't feel like normal coding, more like assembling blocks. 90% of what I do is customization. As a matter of fact, I prototype all of it in Common Lisp before I rewrote it in Java, so I might be in for some pain later, who knows.)