Why Java Isn't Appropriate for Everything

In today's technology landscape, many companies, from brand-new startups to established corporations, feel a strong need to be "buzzword-compliant". This often leads to the inappropriate application of undeniably powerful and exciting new technologies. A recent example of this trend is the indiscriminant proliferation of Java.

Not that I have anything against Java, mind you. On the contrary, as a senior systems engineer, one of my primary responsibilities is maintaining a highly available Application Service Provider (ASP) platform that runs -- you guessed it -- Java servlets within a J2EE platform. Java and the J2EE standard allow a wide choice of development platforms, deployment platforms, and compliant application servers for our production environment. It allows us not to be locked into specific vendors and has made us more efficient in the long run.

That said, of course, there is a time and a place for everything. Although Java delivers the "write once, run anywhere" capabilities that serve our engineers (and us operations folks, too), it simply is not the appropriate tool for everything.

The very premise of "write once, run anywhere" has radically changed the composition and make-up of engineering organizations. The choice of development platforms used to be dictated by the ultimate deployment platform for the product or service being developed. If you were writing applications to be deployed on Solaris, you developed on Solaris; if you were writing Windows applications, you developed on Windows. The practical outcome of this was that software developers necessarily gained a solid understanding of their underlying development platform at the systems level, instead of just the application or code level.