JAVA is good if JAVA is what you need/want.

I can tell you an exactly contrary story. With a one time employer I replaced approximately 13,000 lines of Java - and all of it is now Perl. He had a suite of automated testing tools for the equipment he manufactures, a variety of tools had been implemented with Java after a very keen young rooky graduate had sold them on the idea.

I was a researcher with his company and kept as far away as I could from production. One day I was sitting quietly at my desk (huge open office with senior staff at one end of the room looking out huge glass windowsm very nice) when I heard my friends door slam and much shouting going on inside. Poor young Java developer (had been there two years by this time) was having problems implementing some apps for trouble shooting a product in pre-production. He had promised it for two weeks before and hadn't yet delivered.

So after he was sent back to his desk to get to work on something else I got called in (not unusual as we had known each other and worked together on and off for nearly 25 years). We had coffee, talked about it for a bit and then I was asked - "Well, when you have to exercise your hardware designs what do you use? Don't you use the production suite?" "Oh no" was my reply, "I do my own in Perl". All this testing is pure stimulus and response stuff. The problem with the Java guy was that he was basically trying to do everything from the ground up in Java. So to test this product he had to write a full suite of SSH client, FTP client, FTP server, and all the proprietary stuff.

I turned to a spare machine in his office and logged on as me, sat with the product specs - I had been lead designer for the thing anyway, pulled up my Perl collection of code snippets, hooked up the test bed to the ethernet and away we went. Between my snippets and ethereal (wonderful thing!) we had written code to exercise the widget, found the problem and got the embedded C cutter into the room and fixed the problem before night-fall.

The following day I hired a Perl coder I knew and he turned my snippets into a suite to replace the Java. When we finsihed about three wekks later and put it in productions test bay they reported that the test sequences that took 4 hours on one product were suddenly taking only 23 minutes. On another, the sequence went from 13 hours to 1hr 17minutes. So two years of Java at $25/hr was replaced with Perl in three weeks at $70/hr. Production throughput went up, we used browsers for the GUI, and with the addition of MRTG and a few other standard things we built a much easier to use environment.

Oh what happened to young Java coder? He is still there! (I'm not, I moved continent in the meantime.) Every time we speak he makes a joke about Java, but he also admitted one day that Java had been so mu7ch the falvour of the month when he did his CS degree that he was blind to anything else. Perl was considered particularly un-cool. But now having learned Perl he is happy that un-cool things like Perl have kept him in a job with a nice salary increase and the ocassional "well done". Especially as he was within 24 hours of being fired.

jdtoronto