End of an Era or End of the line for Java?

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Have you ever wondered why IBM and Oracle have so dramatically thrown their hats in the PHP ring? And why PHP will be such a crucial element in their product roadmaps over the next few years? Or Why Java has fallen from favor so far and so fast among the behemoths of the web application market?

To get a good sense for why these announcements are coming, fast and furious, you only need review this article from Sun's weblogs, entitled "Easy JBoss Connection Pooling with NetBeans IDE 4.1 and XDoclet".

Here's an excerpt from the thirteen-step "quick-start guide":

5) Start JBoss from the IDE. Modify the jboss.home property in servers-build.properties and run the jboss-start target. Run it from inside the IDE (you can create a menu item, toolbar button, or shortcut key for it, as described in earlier blog entries). JBoss starts up and the Output window displays output received from JBoss. You'll see a lot of output and it might take a while. Somewhere near the end you should see something similar to the following (truncated here for easier reading)... 6) Build the project to the JBoss autodeploy directory. Right-click the project in the Projects window to build it. (You can also build it in the Files window -- choose File > Set Main Project, set the current project as the main project, and click F11 whenever you want to build.) Modify the jboss-deploy target in servers-build.xml so that war.name is used instead of jar.name. Now run the jboss-deploy target. (If you haven't built the project, you'll get errors because the WAR file that the target tries to copy to the JBoss deployment directory hasn't been built yet.) This copies the application's WAR file to the JBoss autodeploy directory. In the Output window you should see something similar to the following...

Well, you get the picture. The elaborate process is hardly what I would term 'easy' nor, for that matter, intuitive. It makes neurosurgery almost mundane by comparison.

Information Week comments:

...With increasing support among big vendors, it's clear that Java's future is bounded by the scripting languages PHP, Perl, Python and Tcl. These languages are both easier to learn and use than Java 2 Enterprise Edition or C++ or C#. A lot of creativity resides in the hands of these scripting language users. They are less concerned with Java's discipline, which is very good for high-value business functions, such as transaction processing, and more concerned with mixing up what's available in response to individual users on a site. Some PHP advocates say there's no reason enterprise applications won't be built with PHP. Indeed, they already are. The Lufthansa E-ticket site runs on PHP programming. Why not your company's E-commerce? IBM and Oracle are following, not leading, this movement...

Well, it's certainly not the 'end of the line' for Java. But this truly marks the 'end of the beginning' for PHP.

Information Week: End of an Era or End of the line for Java?