Friday, January 20, 2006

Java on the up...

Recently, anecdotal evidence has suggested to me that java's influence has been on the wane... Especially given the view in Cape Town, South Africa - South Africa has traditionally been a microsoft land, while in other countries (mostly first world), microsoft is not so strong.

However, according to Tiobe Programming Commity Index, java is the most popular programming language on the internet, not only that, but java also won the TIOBE Programming Language of 2005 award. Go Java!

Based on more anecdotal evidence is done seem as if microsoft is stronger in the developing world than in the non developing world. I do not think that the battle is between microsoft and java but between closed source proprietary and open source public domain. Open source thrives in environments where you have a high number of educated people as well as a high number of people who have the time to devote to developing open source applications. It stands to reason that if you have a high number of people developing open source applications in their spare time, those same people are going to push the adoption of open source in their day jobs, thereby increasing the popularity of open source, and thus java. It might also be true that open source requires a sufficiently large programming population in order to develop, another reason why java is probably more popular in first world countries.

You may be asking why open source does not fit with VB and C# - the answer is simple. You can't run an open source operating system and code in C#/VB. Okay, before you argue that there are IDE's where this is possible, they are not in the main stream developer market.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Eclipse RCP - have got to see this...

Before I point you to the merits of the Eclipse RCP I'll just digress for a moment and say Happy New Year to all those who deem the new year to be on first of January. I hope 2006 brings many epiphanies for you.

But like I was saying, the RCP is a stunning platform to develop on top of. Every piece of your application is packaged as a plugin so modularising your app is simple. On top of that, you get advanced update and management capability out of the box.

If you need a quick demonstration of its power, then take a look at EclipseZone - Why You Should Use Eclipse RCP (In 10 Minutes).

It'll prove to you the merits of developing on the eclipse RCP platform better than any words could.

btw, the link embeds a short movie clip to walk you through the process of creating a RCP app with eclipse. Unfortunately, it does not work in firefox. However, there is a plugin which with one click allows you to open a site in IE. It changes the current tab to an IE tab. Seemless IE integration! A very useful ie plugin.

How important is the programming language?

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