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James Governor (Industry Analyst at RedMonk) produced the quote of the year at JAX London, with "when web companies grow up they turn into Java shops" (referencing Linkedin, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook). Coincidentally, Andrew Binstock (Editor in Chief at Dr Dobbs) in a widely discussed thread about how vibrant Java still is, gave some of the reasons why this trend occurs: quality tools, vast array of libraries, remarkable portability, brilliant documentation, extensive resources; more features overall than any other language. See our news items below if you want to track into these threads.

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I've often said that it's more than these: there are probably a dozen languages that a large project might consider using because there is a sufficiently wide ecosystem, volume of resources and feature set to make the project succeed in the long term. Of these, Java stands out not only for having overall the most of these features, but critically for me as being the most maintainable language of them. It has the right combination of typing and contraints on the APIs so that when your codebase grows large and a large mix of programmer capabilities are involved in a project, it's still perfectly possible for a new joiner to identify and fix issues, add functionality, and be productive without breaking other parts of the project.

When you look at companies (and hence IT projects) "growing up", maintainability becomes the most critical issue. A young IT project can use pretty much anything, it's highest priority is to become a functioning usable product so that it can be successful; there's no point in worrying about maintainability at this stage since the majority of products won't need to be maintained, because they'll fail. So you'll often see three stages of a succesful project

1. Startup - use whatever gets it working quickest;
2. Scaling - it's success could overwhelm it, so use spit and glue to keep it creaking along until it's obviously soon going to fall over;
3. Maintainable - rework more and more sections in something that is mainstream and maintainable - "grow up". Java isn't the only choice here, but it's easily the best for now.

This is probably even a reasonable route to follow for your IT project - as long as you aren't trapping yourself into some technology that will cost a fortune to rework. Now on to all our usual links to Java performance tools, news, articles and, as ever, all the extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Which garbage collectors are in use statistically (and which are the default collector for various platforms)
• Waratek launches jsleep, a multi-tenant JVM capability to minimize resources of JVM tenants when they are idle (shrinks the heap quota and suspends application threads, until work comes available)
• Contemplate launches ThreadSafe, a Java static analysis tool for analysing concurrency
• "when web companies grow up they turn into Java shops"
• Java has very high quality tools (especially IDEs), a vast array of libraries, remarkable portability, a wealth of documentation and resources; no other language - older or younger - has all these features in such profusion

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Multi-tenant JVM resource minimizer for idle JVM tenants
• Contemplate ThreadSafe Java concurrency static analysis tool
• Getting a beakdown of exactly where time is spent in remote calls from a browser
• SpyGlass Garbage Collector Analyzer (VisualVM plugin)

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Articles

• Chasing the bottleneck: True story about fighting thread contention in your code (Mariano Gonzalez/mulesoft)
• StampedLock Idioms (Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz/The Java Specialists' Newsletter)
• Fine-Grained Concurrency with the Guava Striped Class (Bill Bejeck/codingjunkie)
• Fun with Lambda's (Kirk Pepperdine/java.net)
• Java.lang.OutOfMemory: PermGen Space - Garbage Collecting a Classloader (Raji Sankar/DZone)
• Optimize Late and Not Often (Tim Kitchens/Tim on Technology)

Jack Shirazi

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