Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend: Playing Catch-Up Assumes You Can Catch-Up

For some bizarre reason I see people write this little meme periodically about how C# and .NET will "catch-up" to where Java is now in the next year or two so while there might be social or philosophical reasons to go with one or the other, there won't be any tech reasons.

Whoa, whoa whoa, whoa whoa. I hope that I didn't give the impression that I believed any such nonsense the other day when I gave my list of reasons I hope .NET fails. I just said that I don't think the arguments get anybody anywhere. But if you are deluding yourself into believing that .NET is somehow going to magically "catch-up" to where Java is today in the next year, 18 months or even longer, you need to open your eyes.

What follows is a quick dump from an outline I keep using the Java Outline Editor. I call it my "Java Toolbox" and I keep and categorize links to technology that looks promising in it, this is a short list that skips mounds of stuff I have never had reason to look at and it also blows by reams of excellent commercial tools as well. Look at the length of this list and imagine the veritable army of open source .NET developers (who are apparently going to have to thicken from etherial vapor because I haven't seen them yet) required to build all of this stuff. But, and here's the part that I can't seem to figure out why people don't see it, do you think that Java developers are just going to sit there and watch them do it? Are we just supposed to halt all development and sit on our hands for a couple of years so they can catch-up? No. Catching-up implies that they have to be able at some point to outpace us and I've yet to see anything that has proven to me that that is even a possibility.

My Java Toolbox

Agents

Aglets

http://aglets.sourceforge.net/

Artificial Intelligence/Expert Systems

JGAP: The Java Genetic Algorithms Package

http://jgap.sourceforge.net/#overview

JESS

http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/

JOONE - Java Object Oriented Neural Engine

http://joone.sourceforge.net/

JSR-94

http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr094/

Weka

http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/

Clients

Java POP3 Email Proxy

http://www.zenadsl2993.zen.co.uk/proxy.html

MAILMILL

http://www.metamagix.net/mailmill.html

HTTP

HttpClient

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/index.html

URLFetch Java

http://www.screen-scraper.com/urlfetchjava/doc.shtml

HTTP Proxies

Surfboard Proxy Framework

http://surfboard.sourceforge.net/

PAW

http://paw-project.sourceforge.net/

RSS

News retrieval from hundreds of websites via their RSS syndication files.

HotSheet

http://www.johnmunsch.com/projects/HotSheet

Informa

https://sourceforge.net/projects/informa/

Connected Graphs

GEF

http://gef.tigris.org/

JGraph

http://jgraph.sourceforge.net/

Arakne Network Editor

http://www.arakhne.org/neteditor/

Database

Java based

McKoi

http://www.mckoi.com/database/

HSQLDB

http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net/

Redbase

http://www.bungisoft.com/html/redbase.html

IDEs

DbVisualizer

http://www.ideit.com/products/dbvis/index.html

Squirrel

http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/

Reporting

Generation of reports from databases or other data sources.

Jasper Reports

http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/

JFreeReport

http://www.object-refinery.com/jfreereport/index.html

DataVision

http://datavision.sourceforge.net/

Documentation

Bouvard & Pecuchet

http://web.tiscali.it/farello/bp/intro.html

Xref-java2html

http://www.xref-tech.com/java2html/index.html

Embedded Editors

http://www.hexidec.com/ekit.php

Encryption

The Bouncy Castle Crypto API

http://www.bouncycastle.org/

Frameworks

Web Application

Cocoon

http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/index.html

Struts

http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/index.html

Tapestry

http://tapestry.sourceforge.net/

WebMacro

http://www.webmacro.org/

Socket Communications

SocketTalk

http://www.lightdev.com/template.php4?id=4

Graphics

Batik

http://xml.apache.org/batik/index.html

Charting

JFreeChart

http://www.object-refinery.com/jfreechart/index.html

Chart 2D

http://chart2d.sourceforge.net/

JOpenChart

http://jopenchart.sourceforge.net/

EXIF

Jhead

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

exifExtractor

http://drewnoakes.com/code/exif/

Images

Links

http://www.geocities.com/marcoschmidt.geo/java-image-coding.html

OpenMap

http://www.openmap.org/

Piccolo

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/download/index.shtml

Icons

Links

http://sourceforge.net/projects/icon-collection/

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/techDocs/hi/repository/

LDAP

http://salt.sourceforge.net/

Logs

Tools for creating your logs in the first place and tools for looking at the generated logs.

Logging

Log4j

http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/index.html

Log View/Filtering

Chainsaw

Now bundled with Log4J (see Logging).

Lumbermill

http://traxel.com/lumbermill/

Look and Feel

Want to change the look of your Java application. Here are some ways to do it.

Oyoaha lookandfeel

http://www.oyoaha.com/lookandfeel/

SkinLF

http://www.l2fprod.com/

Metouia look & feel

http://mlf.sourceforge.net/

Misc

screen-scraper

http://www.screen-scraper.com/screen-scraper/doc.shtml

Browser Launcher

http://browserlauncher.sourceforge.net/

Java Conduit Manager (for Palm Conduits)

http://www.xngr.org/cmanager/

Yenc

http://ktulu.8k.com/

Spell Checking

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jazzy

Plugins

Lookup Library

Handles loose coupling so you can build plug-ins.

http://openide.netbeans.org/lookup/

Discovery

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/discovery/

Command Line Handling

CLI

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/cli/

Gnu Getopt

http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/hacking/download.html

jcmdline

http://jcmdline.sourceforge.net/

Multimedia

VorbisSPI, JavaLayer, jlGui

http://www.javazoom.net/projects.html

Java libraries to playback both MP3 and OGG formats and a sample GUI for them that is similar to WinAmp.

FreeTTS

http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php

Peer-to-Peer

Jabber

Echomine Muse

http://sourceforge.net/projects/muse/

JXTA

http://www.jxta.org

JavaGroups

http://www.javagroups.com/javagroupsnew/docs/index.html

Persistence

Object-XML Binding

There are more object to XML bindings in existence than you can even count. This a far from complete list.

Jato

http://krumel.com/jato/

Castor

http://castor.exolab.org/

Prevayler

http://www.prevayler.org/index.html

TJDO

http://tjdo.sourceforge.net/

Program Distribution

IzPack

http://www.izforge.com/izpack/

Java Web Start/JNLP

http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart/index.html

Packlet

http://packlet.sourceforge.net/

Reading and Writing XML

Utilities

txt2xml

http://txt2xml.sourceforge.net/

NekoHTML

http://www.apache.org/~andyc/nekohtml/doc/index.html

jaxen

http://www.jaxen.org/

Element Construction Set

http://jakarta.apache.org/ecs/

Parsing

JAXP

http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxp/index.html

JDOM

http://www.jdom.org

dom4j

http://dom4j.org/

Pipelines

xBeans

http://www.xbeans.org/

Clover ETL

http://members.rogers.com/cloveretl/

Transmorpher

http://transmorpher.inrialpes.fr/

Remote Procedure Calls

SwitchRMI

http://switchrmi.sourceforge.net/

SOAP

Apache Axis

http://xml.apache.org/axis/index.html

GLUE

http://www.themindelectric.com/glue/index.html

XML-RPC

Apache XML-RPC (formerly the Helma XML-RPC library)

http://xml.apache.org/xmlrpc/

Scheduling

Jcrontab

http://jcrontab.sourceforge.net/

Scripting

BeanShell

http://www.beanshell.org

Bean Scripting Framework

http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/index.html

Searching

Lucene

http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/

Server Administration

JMX

JMX offers a simple way for you to package server components so you can make them administrable locally or remotely. JBoss and many other server packages now make their components MBeans (managable beans) just to get this functionality.

Consider it seriously for any server software you might be building.

MC4J Management Console

http://mc4j.sourceforge.net/

XtremeJ

http://www.xtremej.com/index.php

MX4j

http://mx4j.sourceforge.net/

JBossMX

http://www.jboss.org/developers/jboss-jbossmx.jsp

JMX Homepage (Reference JMX Implementation Available Here)

http://java.sun.com/products/JavaManagement/index.html

AdventNet Agent Toolkit Java/JMX Edition

http://www.adventnet.com/

Servers

MrPostman

http://mrbook.org/mrpostman/

HTTP

Jetty

http://jetty.mortbay.com/jetty/index.html

http://www.tagtraum.com/jo.html

J2EE

JBoss

http://www.jboss.org/

Templates

FreeMarker

http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/

Velocity

http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/index.html

XSLT

http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/

Tools

Swing GUI Testing

Marathon

http://marathonman.sourceforge.net/

Workflow

Open For Business

http://www.ofbiz.org/

Jakarta Commons Workflow Project

http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs/jakarta-commons-sandbox/workflow/

OSWorkflow

http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/

werkflow

http://werkflow.werken.com/

Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

Playing Catch-Up Assumes You Can Catch-Up

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