I certainly agree J2EE is a travesty. Framework design by committee is wrong wrong wrong. I do not agree that Java is all that great. I classify it as "ok".

I certainly agree J2EE is a travesty. Framework design by committee is wrong wrong wrong. I do not agree that Java is all that great. I classify it as "ok". I don't disparage "ok" but there were languages before Java that were better than "ok". Java isn't and never was a revolution, it picks from various things that came before and in some places make incremental improvement. During the early days of J2EE I built an app framework that ended up being about 300,000 lines of Java, we had to replace most of the core JDK classes as well due to their poor design. What we ended up with was enterprise quality but far more accessible than the J2EE equivalents. Prior to this app framework, I built essentially the same thing in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk version was much fewer lines of code, easier to maintain, easier for the end-user. And so far as Java performs great, yes it does. One key reason is the hotspot and jit stuff which were directly taken from the Smalltalk world. btw, when I'm playing up Smalltalk here, I know its hard for newcomers to see the value as Squeak is "hard to take" compared to what we had in the early 90s. [EDIT] one thing I do like about Java is it forces the programmer to think more formally about an object's interface. This is a good skill to learn and can be applied to other languages. The loose way some play with duck typing is a little much for my tastes.