rabbitfang

Yes. Endless XML configs, and a ton of overhead to get started. Anyone can get productive with Play in 5 minutes. Spring + Hibernate were smart choices in 2003, but no longer the case.

You do realise there is more than "renaming variables" to refactoring don't you?!?

XML may have nothing to do with Java, but some Java frameworks (e.g. Spring) are obsessed with it. Many (most?) Java devs don't even like Spring. Who in their right mind would want to write code to call constructors in XML? no type checking, no refactoring support etc.

JRuby is pretty nifty, still can't compare performance-wise to statically typed languages e.g. Scala: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Probably more comparable to Groovy in syntax and performance.

Google is heavily reliant on Java. LinkedIn and Twitter both use Scala and Java. I'm not really sure that pointing out that Google has some C++ code really disproves that Java is used heavily at google. Java is still very widely used, more so than more fashionable languages like python and ruby, but the syntax is a bit long on the tooth, hence the popularity of Scala, Clojure and Groovy.

You were clear, but if you're going to compare languages you can't cherry pick which features to compare. You compared Java to C performance and then Java to Ruby in terms of expressiveness. Since Ruby does not have the performance of C and C does not have the expressiveness of Ruby it's not really a fair comparison to Java.

You're criticizing Java for being slow, and then presenting Ruby as an alternative. You do realise that Java is up to 100 times faster than Ruby: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all.... And on multicore systems Java up to 300x faster than Ruby: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

...alternatively combine the performance of Java with a highly expressive language e.g. Scala

Groovy, Scala + Clojure = next generation of languages being adopted by Java devs. All the things we love about Java combined with a more modern syntax.

...and that is why the latest generation of JVM languages such as Scala, Clojure and Groovy are so popular. Java the platform is extremely stable, highly optimized and heavily instrumented. Java is much less verbose than C++ (the main alternative when it was released), but the times have moved on.

With Scala statically typed and verbose are not synonymous. Statically typed = high performance. Type inference and compact syntax = expressive. Best of both worlds. Languages like Ruby bring expressive syntax, but performance suffers. Performance is becoming increasingly important with mobile applications, one of many reasons Ruby adoption has stagnated since the end of 2010 (see open source contribution and indeed.com charts).

Play2 is released for production use and works with both Java and Scala. You've linked to an article which says essentially nothing.

You're suggesting that Vert.x is more production ready when it was only released 3 days ago? http://vertxproject.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/vert-x-1-0-fina...

I'd look at Play framework V2 + Scala http://www.playframework.org/ and Vert.x http://vertxproject.wordpress.com/ (Scala support coming soon). Since you already know Ruby you may consider using JRuby or Groovy with Vert.x as other options. Scala and Java are more efficient though.

A good list of books for learning Play and Scala: http://capecoder.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/scala-books-being-...

IntelliJ + Scala plugin is widely regarded as the best IDE for Scala work: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/free_java_ide.html

Why would it surprise you that a statically typed language like Java on the highly optimized JVM is faster than Javascript?

Any benchmark you care to look at should clearly shows JVM is much faster: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all...

+1 for Scala

Might be nice to also see a FAQ about the differences between vert.x and Play 2

Regular Java is currently faster (up to 3x) than C# on mono: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al... ...but obviously on a phone it's going to be Dalvik not regular JVM

We need to consider memory consumption too. Dalvik obviously uses less memory than regular JVM, and probably less than mono if I were to guess.

Thanks. Will definitely check it out.

Thanks for the summary. Very exciting developments!

The Scala code for the same task gets the job done in half as many lines: http://capecoder.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/spellchecker-in-sc...

>Zimbabwe, Africa

Off-topic, but it really shouldn't be necessary to provide a continent when naming a country e.g. Japan, Asia.

In the case of Tiobe one of the problems is that Scala programmers don't typically say "Scala programming", but rather "Programming Scala" or "Programming in Scala" which maps back to the book titles. Tiobe searches for the specific string "Scala programming"

You may want to correct your spelling of Clojure: http://www.indeed.com/q-Closure-jobs.html