There has been a lot of talk lately that Java is on its way out, mostly fueled by Apple deprecatingJava, and by Apache threateningto quit Java.
I’m not crying Chicken Little just yet, but perhaps it’s time to start looking for the Next Big Thing. There are certainly a lot of contenders out there: Ruby (and Rails), Scala, Groovy (and Grails). My guess is there’ll be a couple of false starts before a clear winner is declared.
This all feels very similar to the late-90s when C/C++ were waning in popularity. Back then it was all about time-to-market and code complexity. So it is once again with Java.