The Disco Blog

In writing JavaWorld’s “The future is now — Java development in 2008”, I had the pleasure of asking a copasetic group of individuals their thoughts on what the future holds for Java. It wasn’t surprising that a majority of these disco dancers mentioned the OpenJDK project as a giant step of innovation, which could usher in a new era for Java (and all things that run on the JVM itself).

One particular project, dubbed Da Vinci, seems to owe its hip inception to an October 2007 emailing where John Rose of Sun proposed a Multi-Language VM, which, by the way, should be familiar to some in the community as it is an evolutionary offshoot of the “Kitchen Sink” project. Of interest is John’s own words in which he states that this project will address

“pain points” already observed by implementors
of successful or influential languages

Back when I picked up Jython, I was amazed that someone had actually gotten Python to work with the JVM; however, thinking that someday the JVM itself could change (because of this wizardry) was unthinkable. Times are changing though, man! While Jython appears to have slithered away, JRuby, Groovy, and Scala are all the rage– and now they are, in turn, influencing Java.

Case in point– InfoWorld recently published an article entitled “Sun’s Da Vinci Machine broadens JVM coverage“, where the author states that the project

is intended to overcome obstacles like mismatches between a source language’s design patterns and JVM capabilities. Because the JVM was designed for Java and Java favors some design patterns over others, implementers can find themselves dealing with these mismatches…

The question of course is, will Sun’s Da Vinci project survive? Make no mistake– Da Vinci isn’t revolutionary– the Perl world has been working on Parrot (another multi-langauge VM) for some time (at one point I thought it was supposed to run Java?).

Indeed, because it’s Java bag, Java is rapidly transforming from a language to a platform; what’s more, alternate languages, which solve some problems much more easily than Java, are profoundly influencing not only developers’ day to day activities but the heart of Java itself.

For inspiration, all you have to do, man, is either listen to some disco music or take a look at Mr. Leonardo da Vinci– this brilliant man was a musician, a scientist, an artist, and 14 other things! So too is the Java platform– it’s Java, Ruby, Groovy, Scala, Jython, JEE, Applets, you name it. It’s all that (and 14 other things!).

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