Languages very rarely die, they linger. We only have to look at Cobol to see that. As a language Cobol still manages to drive many a large company on the basis of the fear of rewriting or refactoring legacy.

So the next statement will probably annoy the hell out of the old guard….

If Java ecosystem doesn’t embrace change then it will slowly die.

The issue is not with the language itself, the issue is how product is built and maintained. We all like to see things up and running in a barebones way quickly.  Apart from the libraries on Apache Foundation the rest of the ecosystem is currently looking like the fallen remains of the Titanic, something grand and glorious that sank, broke in two and leaves fragments of itself lying around waiting for someone interested to come and collect it.

Maven has dependency awareness but I would wager that the actual repository is past it’s sell by date. I’m not the only one to say this.

Look, it’s so bad that even Celine is holding out here hand to help.

Ruby works…. yes I said it. Okay it’s not 100% but it works. The gem install command works and it’s needed in Java if it doesn’t exist already. I’m actually surprised there isn’t an Ant extention to deal with this, I’m sure there is somewhere but then that’s an extension and something else to install. 

The Java ecosystem has become a bundle of bolted on mis-shapes and over the years it has ungracefully sank. If we want Hadoop and the great BigData five year horizon to be the next best thing for business and for Java I think there’s a little clean up work we need to do first. 

Starting point is a decent jar installer for projects. This thing has to be seamless.