Steve Jobs had some bad stuff to say about Java and Jonathan Schwarz has responded as part of his most recent interview with Scoble. If you haven’t heard any of this before, get the scoop here.

Now, whether or not you agree with Jobs on his stance in respect of Java and the iPhone, he is right on one thing: Java is getting heavyweight. And it’s not because of the language or even the platform but the way in which it’s all delivered to the desktop, server etc.

It comes as a monolithic package, all or nothing. You can extend it via classpath or whatever as you wish but there’s something deeply wrong with this picture……

And that is the fact that Java is designed to be dynamically extensible not monolithic and static as is the prevailing pattern pursued by Sun’s JDK development team and the world of J2EE. Remember, Java in it’s early days was all about code-downloading and dynamic extension. Yet, all of those leading the Java masses seem to insist on ignoring this fact and continuing to build structures that are perhaps even less dynamic than C++ with shared libraries?

Worse, we’ve tried to fix this sort of thing by adding support for scripting languages etc “because Java isn’t dynamic”. And we’ve got all these static compile time constructs we’ve added when perhaps a better solution would be better support at runtime to trap and fix these problems.

We’ve been dropping the ball for a long time - we’ve ignored a core construct of Java and now we’re complaining about the consequences. To Schwarz, Sun and the Java masses, stop leading Java down the path of static, ever-larger, monolithic bloatware. Go back to Java’s core, fix it and start building again. If you need help with understanding what might need doing, go read this paper then go talk to OSGi and the Jini community.

I posted recently on the increasing interest in making IT more green. But keeping control of power consumption and it’s associated side-effects has been with us for some time. Google have been facing this issue and published articles and papers on it some time back. Now, one could argue that Google are an extreme example. But think about this……….

It doesn’t matter how big of a data-centre you have or need, you face the same issues Google does. And those issues cost a lot of money and given that enterprises are concerned with cost reduction, it surely makes sense to pay more attention to this subject.

So far we’ve only talked about the hardware, what about the software? We all know that whilst XML is “more open” (I’d debate even that argument) it costs a lot of CPU time, we also know that due to network infrastructure preferences we do a lot of un-necessary polling which also costs CPU time. And we compound this by what we encourage in modern programmers who’ve never programmed in assembler for a system with maybe 4k of memory and a 1Mhz CPU and thus haven’t learnt to be very careful about resource consumption. Those same programmers are not encouraged to focus on the quality of algorithm selection or design, code is king.

If we are to tackle the power consumption issues, it’s not just the hardware that needs to improve, we need better architecture which can dynamically adapt to platform and load changes (Amazon EC2 anyone?) and a new generation of tools and frameworks but, just as important we need programmers who will raise their head out of the code and view the consequences of their actions from a more global perspective. Business needs to look long, avoiding the rampant short-termism that is a key signature of recent times and realize that focusing harder on design rather than just cranking out code will save them money over time because their systems will be more modular, more efficient and less costly to maintain.

Finally if that’s not a compelling business case, consider that recent history shows the consuming public is starting to demand that car manufacturers etc produce greener alternatives and a well known hardware manufacturer is leveraging this in their marketing. It’s entirely possible this trend will spread to websites where consumers will choose your competitor because they can say “we are 50% more power efficient”.

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