Development language - why Java?

[Thomas Sødring]

On 11/07/2016 02:39 PM, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Thank you for the warm welcome.  I have a meta-question I would like to
> hear your answer to.  Why are you developing the server using the Java
> language?  Which options did you consider, what which factors were most
> important when choosing language?
>

The most important aspect was cross-platform. I was active in the 90's
and saw first-hand what happens when you are locked into a single OS.

Skill-wise I am a PHP and Java developer. You can see what I've done
with Noark and PHP here [1]. My goal has been to introduce as much Noark
5 knowledge as possible in a cross-platform way. My understanding of the
Norwegian Noark vendors is that they are all based on Microsoft and
.net. I think this situation is extremely unfortunate and we really need
to see more Noark in other technologies.

Why Java? I have been led to believe that enterprise software is written
in either .net or java and if I wanted the project to be taken seriously
I'd have to choose one of these platforms. I know that isn't really
correct, but it's been at the back of my mind. I have seriously
considered PHP as I have been working with the inter-municipality
archives and tried to help them with their scripting needs. From talking
to technical people though, JBOSS and JavaEE were often mentioned as the
platform of choice for government bodies.

Norway also has a relatively large Java community and if I am to attract
others I need to speak the same language. I've also been a Java
developer since version 1.0.

A natural further question would be to ask why spring source? Spring
seems to have a massive following and a *lot* of JavaEE development is
done in Spring. Oracle seems to have  neglected JavaEE and my
understanding is that the Pivotal people has in some ways taken Oracles
role. Spring has been a nightmare to learn though! The learning curve is
very large, but when you look at the requirements of the project, you
get so much from investing in spring. Just the issue of pagination.
Spring saves me a lot of effort there. It also saves me from writing
tonnes of boilerplate code. Spring security makes security much easier
for integrating with various security measures and spring is cloud ready
for those that want that.

 - Tom

[1] https://github.com/KDRS-SA/noark5-validator