JavaProgrammingWithCORBA

Andreas Vogel, Keith Duddy Java Programming with Corba 2nd ed [ISBN 0471247650 (amazon.com, search)]

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This book, together with ProgrammingInJavaIDL?, belongs to a period in the history of Java so short it hardly seems that it happened. This was the time just after Java matured enough for people doing commerical development to even begin to take it seriously, and just before J2EE started to take over the world.

The time when IBM UK's "Java Evangelist" was telling me that the Java environment was the interesting thing, that the Java language would co-exist with other, more interesting ones, such as Eiffel.

The time when Java looked like a usefully platform-neutral technology to roll into the distributed systems that we already knew very well how to build using CORBA. The time when Java looked as if it would play well with others.

don't leave us non-programmers hanging! What happened next?

What happened was that a bunch of Java technologies for doing web front-ends (servlets: quite nice in their way), and for implementing the servers behind them (EJB, JDBC: a waking nightmare) got rolled together under the Java 2 Enterprise Edition rubric. This many-headed hydra was picked up by many of the dot-com's and suddenly became (for political and marketing reasons) the must have technology for any large corporation producing a web offering.

One of the goals of the original Java project was to produce a language in which it would be safe for people to download executables from the 'net written by any old developer, and any old developer who wasn't very good, either. As a side effect this produced a language that the IT drones in those same large corporations, and also wet-behind-the-ears Comp. Sci graduates could learn very quickly.

Sun began to promote themsleves as "the dot in dot-com", and to allow systems that made the grade to bear the "100% pure Java" livery. And also to sell huge servers by the skip-load, since EJB performed very, very badly in its early incarnations. The net result was that any interest in the other languages that run on the JVM dropped to zero, and any interest in inter-operating Java components with any non-Java components (except business critical legacy ones) also dropped to zero.

And thus most opportunities for interesting, innovative work were eliminated in the majority of large programming shops; many commerical developers had their minds turned to jelly by a weak and flabby language; and I hightailed it to the embedded sector. Not that I'm bitter ;-)

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A blast from the past... I worked with Andreas and Keith when they were writing this book. We were doing some cool multi-platform distributed research, product development and consulting at the time. Now the majority of work seems to be mainframesque terminal apps whose main distinction from applications three decades old is the use of a bitmapped terminal. Not that I'm bitter, either ;-) --JulianBoot

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A BookOnTheBookshelf.