Jack Shirazi posts a dialogue between he and an experienced Java developer on the subject of whether Java is cool or not. I don’t really agree with either side to any great extent. I think that the “uncool” side person exaggerates his claim that hackers are abandoning Java. I also think he’s completely wrong about the direction that Java is headed in. The new J2EE specs that are still being worked on are a lot more realistic than what we have now. The J2EE community has undergone a quiet revolution where many of the best developers have rejected EJB and application servers in favor of lightweight frameworks that enable faster and more flexible development. Sun seems to have come around that point of view as well. When I look at things like Hibernate and Spring (which is very young), I see the state of the art in Java development moving in the right direction. I don’t know how cool Java is, but I still enjoy doing Java development, and that’s something I can’t really say about Perl or PHP. (I still have yet to get serious about Python.)