In Python Your Life, I said I didn’t like Java. And I really didn’t. I first met Java at the Internet World 1996 in Rio de Janeiro :-). My last visit to that wonderful city. Single, with some money in my pocket… ah… Copacabana and the small bars of Rio… putz, I remembered that even back then I left my watch at home, afraid of robberies. But Rio is beautiful.

Well, Sun presented Java and mainly the differences between Java and JavaScript. I had a small provider in Manaus and we used a Sun server. I suffered to write the programs for the provider in C++, I remember spending two weeks looking for the binary files of GCC for microSparc… long live Google (back then the best was AltaVista). Java was free and the compiler from Sun cost around $3,000.00 (without manuals…), I fell in love with Applets and for a good time Java was just Applets.

But to me, the language was never anything more than C++ in disguise. I didn’t have problems with pointers, I even thought it was normal to work with them and get seg faults here and there :-). The problem is that back then I didn’t see anything beyond that. Why write something in Java if I already had my libraries in C and C++? It wasn’t clear to me the advantages of being multi-platform. And Java 1.0 nobody forgets… On Windows, I had Delphi and on Linux I also had C/C++, it was just a matter of recompiling. To me, Java became a way to make my home pages look nice with applets or to make my CGIs slower than in C/C++.

Time passed and the Java language became popular. EJB, Java 2, Hibernate, and Tomcat started appearing. But by that time I was no longer programming, I was managing. I lost touch with Java development.

I only seriously considered Java for the desktop after seeing Eclipse and its library. Then we started making programs for a client abroad, using Java and BEA. I started to like it, but I got worried about the productivity of programmers, they needed a lot of framework to make something work. A Java programmer doesn’t earn little money, thank God :-). There was equipment and money with licenses… a new intern started working with Tomcat and the tiger ate him alive :-). It wasn’t an easy comeback. By that time I had started calling Java Jaca. It was big and nobody could eat it alone :-).

Last year, I started developing a new web application using Ajax and multiple threads. Guess which language I chose to develop my small monster? Java. I was impressed with the improvements in Java 5, mainly with templates and operations on lists. The library of the language is also excellent, plus Eclipse with its affordable price. I created the server and it works great. I even migrated some low-level utilities written in Visual C++ and .Net to Java. Last week I installed the server for the first time on Linux and it worked well, I didn’t need to make any changes. I switched from MySQL to Firebird 1.5 and then to Firebird 2.0. I didn’t need to change much, thanks to Hibernate. Okay, the server uses around 47 MB of RAM just for itself… but a comb with 512 MB costs around €30.00. I cost more than that. Between buying the comb and losing my hair debugging reentrant code in C++… I prefer to buy the comb :-)

I’m already using Java 6, don’t worry about it.

So, I made peace with Java. Sorry to those poor souls who tried to sell me Java before, I’ll give you a thumbs up. You were right. But it was a Jaca, after all.