Is Java suitable for today’s web-development?

I know it’s a provocative subject and I might get flamed for it but I have to share my thoughts on the suitability of Java for today’s web development.

As always, the applications are developed to solve business or other human problems. Therefore the closer the application implementation is to the domain of the problem – the faster and better the application development is. If you’re programming bank application you want to operate with bank accounts, not object arrays. If you’re developing gaming application you want to develop players profiles and game rules, not low-level 3d rendering.

If you’re developing a web-application, for example facebook app, you want to deal with RESTful Facebook Graph API, with social features, and at least with somewhat interactive pages. What you don’t want to do is to deal with low-level plumbing like mechanics of reading the URL content. Such details are nothing but an accidencial complexity within the system.

A simple example:

Let’s say you need to read content of RESTful URL something like https://graph.facebook.com/me. All you really want is to get a string with the URL's content.

In Groovy it would look like this: “https://graph.facebook.com/me”.toURL().getText()

After spending few hours trying to find something similar in Java I have reached a conclusion that the best I can do is either:

1. Use apache HttpClient and deal with hierarchy of its objects. This is a bit more than few lines of code.
2. Try to find another obscure library.
3. Write custom code like this:

public static String getText(String url) throws Exception {
        URL website = new URL(url);
        URLConnection connection = website.openConnection();
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                                new InputStreamReader(
                                    connection.getInputStream()));

        StringBuilder response = new StringBuilder();
        String inputLine;
        while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) 
            response.append(inputLine);
        in.close();
        return response.toString();
    }

Now, of course, I can write it and encapsulate it in some helper utility object etc.

But the problem is that this code has nothing to do with the problem that I’m trying to address in my application. It represents a much lower level of abstraction. At yet I’m forced to resort to spending time on researching, implementing, testing, maintaining such a basic functionality.

For comparison, Ruby/Groovy/Python developer does not need to know anything about BufferedReaders, InputStreams, using StringBuilder for loops etc. All he really needs to know is the URL, and the string where to put the content.

It might seem that I’m blowing this issue out of proportion but I think it exemplifies a much deeper problem. Java was invented and evolved in a different era. Today’s web applications use different and higher abstractions. This is normal cycle of development of computer languages. Each new generation abstracts low-level details of the previous generation allowing developers to focus more on their problem domain. 15 years ago java simplified development by allowing programmers not to care about pointer arithmetic, destructors and other C++ plumbing.

I know that Java is a generic language and it will continue to be used for a very long time. But guess what: C++, and shockingly even COBOL are still in use, but in only very narrow domains (embedded or low-level programming for C++ and ancient legacy systems for COBOL).

I suspect that Java is going in the same direction. Today I would be hard pressed to start development of a decent web-application in pure Java.

By the way – I had exact same argument about C++ and Java about 10 years ago with my former colleagues.