[geodel]

I have heard from many of my friends about massive projects of 'modernizing' mainframe applications with Java stack. Java did not deliver improvement that management was expecting. Once the project consumed all the budget for ~25% completion, they were scrapped.

I think, though without any proof, that overreliance of 100s of mixed quality libraries, combined with 'best practices' of enterprise development and heavy application of design patterns creates a very large surface area for change. This makes reasonable translation of functionality to Java almost impossible.

[neeleshs]

Was it Java that did not deliver improvement, or was it the team? :)

[acdha]

… or organizational culture? A lot of places really wanted to believe the problem was the technology because that's relatively much easier to change than going to a bunch of very senior managers and telling them that the way they're used to doing business is too expensive to continue.

[geodel]

I am inclined to say Java as I have not seen mythical teams who work on Java without whole caboodle of 'Enterprise Apps' culture.

[electrum]

You can write modern software on Java without using "enterprise" features: https://github.com/prestodb/presto

[geodel]

Nice. It may be the best way to organize project this large. I know this is maven thing and once using everyone's favorite Intellij IDEA it should not matter but I personally find ~1000 directories for ~4000 files a kind of Javasim.

[bsg75]

Can you expand on what makes the Presto project different than the aforementioned enterprise approach? (Not a Java developer, so I don't have context)

[neeleshs]

I believe its more because companies that have "enterprise apps" culture embraced java more, rather than it being the fault of Java itself. I've seen first-hand when these companies have "enterprisified" C++, C# and heck, even PHP

I do think Java the language has a long way to go, but it is catching up a bit. I see it as the least common denominator language for most companies. Large open source java projects have been successful (everything on hadoop, hbase, cassandra etc) and a lot less enterprisey.