Seven Year Itch
Java and I have been together now for more than 6 years. After a college fling with C++ and a very brief not-so-torrid affair with COBOL (coming from C++, a few months was enough to make a guy seriously consider the priesthood), I met Java one fine Spring (you know, the season) day back in the late nineties. Sure, maybe I was on the rebound but compared to working storage areas, Java was one sweet lady! Once more I had full blown object support and no silly restrictions on where a comment could go…and of course all the excitement of a fresh new passion.
After the heady first couple of projects, Java and I settled into a nice little routine. We had a very comfortable relationship - I knew her limits and she knew mine. Sure, like anyone, I was a little annoyed when every year or so brought a whole new raft of changes and I couldn’t help but notice she’s added a few kilobytes (OK, megabytes) to her formerly svelte frame. I’m not one to judge and she just smiles saying “it’s just more of me to love.” Or was it learn?
Still, lately I feel like we are starting to grow apart. After all, I’ve spent most of my career “webifying” legacy COBOL applications and while I certainly prefer semicolons to line numbers after a while I started to wonder if maybe grafting a web page onto a relational database wasn’t just a tad too difficult with Java.
Don’t get me wrong, I mean, heck, her support for transactions and threading and whatnot is great - but I find myself largely ignoring so much of the “enterprise” stack. Heck once I even got into an argument with a guy that insisted I wasn’t “doing EE” since my projects were favoring straight JDBC over entity beans. But as I take an objective look at what goes into generating simple HTML representing a basic table with Java, frankly, I had to wonder - isn’t there an easier way? It wasn’t that long ago all those spurned by C were saying Java was so much simpler…
Lately, I’ve been wondering if it’s time for Java and I to talk a little break, you know, get some space. I mean, after all, I’ve been faithful (mostly) for the last six plus years and we’ve had a lot of good times but I can’t stop thinking about that sexy little number across the street. And man, when Ruby gets all dressed up in nine inch Rails…can you say stops traffic?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I’m coming up on the seven year itch.