For about 7 years that I have done active coding, it has been mostly using Java, a language I fell in love with when I wrote my first hello world program in it, way back in 1997. I liked the fact that it was natural for me to think, design and code in a language which was so close to OOP concepts. Everybody during that time in Bangalore seemed to be learning Java and java courses were selling like hot potatoes throughout ever mushrooming computer learning centers. Java was the language in demand and a passport to get a quick programming job. Some time later I came to know about EJBs and J2EE which were projected as some sort of Holy Grail of distributed systems. Everybody wanted to work on EJB projects. JSP/servlets were for lesser mortals. When I read EJB specification and J2EE book (I think it was wrox series) for first time, I felt like a student reading a high philosophy from the Zen Masters. It was beautiful. EJBs were the black art. Then sometime later came J2EE design patterns, pet shop and blueprints. You couldn’t; get through an interview if you didn’t know about Blueprints or if you didn’t know about session facade and value objects.
Well, those good old days…. lots of things happened after that within industry and with java language. I personally, have worked a bit with other languages like PHP which I got to learn because it seemed to be the lingua franca of internet. For me coding in PHP was difficult initially as I hated those nested arrays without which you couldn't do a lot in PHP and I missed beauty of strict typing of java. Exposure to internet made me realize that most large, high volume systems are written not in Java but in scripting languages. Possibly because such systems are easy to host and possibly because dynamic languages are natural fit for volatile business of internet. Whatever the reason, java has clearly lagged behind on web. Its focus has been behind firewall, within enterprise, backend processing. So for old time sake and love of a language, it is good to know when you come across a high volume internet site written entirely in java. Below is a presentation which explains how Linkedin runs on 99% java. Just to get an idea of scale, here are some numbers:
- 22 million members
- 4+ million unique visitors/month
- 40 million page views/day
- 2 million searches/day
Take a loot at architecture and how it has evolved. It is all about partitoning the data I guess and 1% is taken by C++ implmentation of custom JVM heap!!. Also read this post here.
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