"Now let’s look at Sun (let’s leave Oracle out of it for now, shall we?). Sun is the custodian of Java, and that’s perfectly good reason for it to back the Java development platform completely. And Java can be cosidered a success to a certain extent. It’s still holding strong at the enterprise level. Huge companies like IBM are making tons of money from it peddling to major financial institutions around the world. Problem is, Java is seen as sort of a pariah where small to medium development projects are concerned. “It takes 4 gigabytes of RAM just to bootstrap the VM”, “didja just see the length of that package name I just had to type?!?!?!”,”dude, I just read the specs for EJB 2.1… I’m still looking for my cojones on the dorm floor”. Common complaints we hear from developers standing around the peripheries of Java development.
"The Glassfish application server is the reference JEE implementation and started out being just another application server. It was OpenSource and all, but take up was still limited to those who wanted to work with Java as a development language. Personally, I don’t find Java that difficult. It’s a pain to bootstrap development but that’s been alleviated a lot by using Maven to manage projects. I like a lot of the features of the platform such as pooling and a proper framework for asynchronous processing. But one part that’s definitely been falling behind is where web development is concerned. Too much boilerplate code still."
