Some suggested patches and improvements

[Gregg Wonderly]

> On May 17, 2017, at 3:08 AM, Andrew Dinn <adinn at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> On 16/05/17 19:11, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
> 
> <ad cohortem hominum snipped (pardon my French)>
> 
>> If we really cannot actually keep from breaking 90% of existing Java
>> in the market place when this new JDK release goes out, how valuable
>> is JigSaw really?
> 
> citation needed?

This is going to seem like more ranting, but alas, I am mentally worn out by Jigsaw and the devolution of Java that it reinforces by continuing to only worry about a limited set of Server application environments with the Jigsaw team apparently, completely ignorant of the vast application environments where Java has been deployed, including clickable jar files.

I understand that you might feel this is an excessive rant.  But, practically I know of Java applications around the world which all use things like Spring.  I know of many others which are using reflection and all kinds of .setAccessible() behaviors to manage “serialization” and other tasks for foreign classes.  As someone who doesn’t use Java-EE or any other “well used” platform, but rather uses many things I created myself well before those things existed, I suspect that I will find breakage in my larger apps simply because of setAccessible() which I use for introspection in tools (via Introspector etc.) and other things (like serialization).

Maven seems to be something that the Jigsaw team had no real knowledge about.  It just suddenly introduced a flurry of conversation on the list as something that was unimportant for modularization and jar reference issues.   Another pointer to the lack of foresight the Jigsaw team seemed to have into the realities of how Java is actually used around the world.

I have not tried JDK-9 on any of my applications primarily because I have zero spare work cycles to do that at this point.  This list content and the general visible attitude of the team towards backwards compatibility tell me that 1) I will have problems, 2) I could mention them here, but little will happen to make my investigation create less work in the future for me.

So, I consider that JDK-9 GA will in fact be a platform departure moment for me.  I will be looking at Swift and/or Go and just moving on.  My experience with Java started out great.  I had a lot of good experiences at JavaOne, and enjoyed getting to be a part of the Sun developers advisory council for the first few years.  Then I learned that there were about 3 people at Sun who only cared about Java as a platform for selling more Sun servers, and the recommendations of the SDAC, to Sun seemed to fall on deaf ears.  James Gosling told us he could feel our pain and didn’t really know how to help us, help Sun make better choices.

So, now here we are into the Oracle legacy.  Two of the same 3 people seem to still be around (Jonathan fired one a while back at Sun) making huge influence and still feeling like a wreaking ball, destroying much opportunity for Java to actually unify the software development world.

If it wasn’t clear enough based on the continued development of more (procedural, object oriented) programming languages around the world, Java is way off course to ever be a general solution to software development.  The server environment is like 2% of the space Java could succeed in.  The Java Card market is a fixed space which should of evolved to include things like what Apple Pay does.  Yet chip cards in the US are floundering because the technology is so slow to boot and run.  Now, credit card transactions are 4-5x slower than they used to be.

JavaFX wasn’t much of a concern here on the list for some time.  There was no conversation about anything regarding compatibility.  It’s supposed to be a big part of the evolution of the desktop environment, and you’d think that Oracle employees would be working together, across the company.  It’s that kind of neglect of the “impact” on the platform which makes me feel like everything about JigSaw is a closed room idea which got a lot of work by a small group, and now with the level of investment made, anything that’s voiced as negative about what’s been done, is just viewed as a whinny rant instead of as something valuable for the team to learn about.  There are literally, I would bet, 10,000 more things to learn about Jigsaw breaking/impacting that have zero value to the community, but will make the Jigsaw team feel strong and empowered because they are “making evolution of the platform possible”.

At the beginning it was mostly those 3 people…Now I am not sure that its worth worrying about who is responsible as much as it will be to figure out the fastest way out…

I still marvel at the sheer magnitude of rework that Jigsaw is imposing on the world at large, and what small, literally unimportant impact that it will have after that rework occurs.

Gregg