Saturday, August 26, 2006

So is Java finally dead?

Having recently graduated I've been looking around a lot for graduate jobs and I've started to notice quite a strong trend - no one wants Java anymore! Ok so maybe that is a small exaggeration, there are one or two people advertising for people with skills in J2SE and maybe putting together Swing interfaces, but for every job that wants java skills there are between 5 and 10 that want C# and .NET...I bet Microsoft are patting themselves on the back right now.

I just did a quick search on graduate jobs on TotalJobs...I got 16 jobs for Java, and 59 for C#/.NET, but what was quite telling was that these were all in descriptions like "C++/Java/Object Oriented" (i.e. where they are looking for someone with general OO skills) - not one of those 16 jobs was a pure Java-orientated role!

What makes this kinda interesting is, as far as I am aware, pretty much every Uni in the country offering a Computer Science course is using Java as its primary OO teaching language; I know at mine every step you took, every corner you turned there was a module stuffing Java down your throat. Can students across the land (and potentially the world...?) finally look forward to a new Java-free curriculum? Unfortunately I doubt it; I really cannot see Comp-Sci professors willingly making the switch across the Microsoft - the Evil Empire - and .NET for teaching! I gave a quick thought about some alternatives but nothing really sprang to mind - what other OO language is out there that is general purpose, easy to use and - most importantly of all for the students - is actually a usable language they can use in a job when the graduate?

Looking back just a year ago Java still had quite a lot of market share. When I was deciding which language to use for my final year project I ended up in the situation of using either ASP.NET of Java and JSP. I almost ended up going the JSP route, but thankfully decided it would be useful to get another language under my belt. Boy am I glad I did that now - it seems like there are a lot of ASP.NET jobs around now...I've yet to see a single graduate JSP one advertised...

Its not all bad for Java though - there will no doubt be a huge raft of legacy J2EE applications requiring maintenance from poor Java coders for years (decades?!) to come. And as much as I bitterly hate Java on the desktop, I have to admit that on mobile phones its a fantastic idea (this sort of thing is really what Java was designed for after all...well if you ignore the washing machines anyway) and seems to work pretty well. Maybe this will be the future of Java now - hidden away where we barely see it behind website and on our phones? I cant say I'll miss it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Are you still looking for a job?

Why not try CWJobs.co.uk

They have over 3k Java jobs