The New Cross Platform

When I first started professional programming, Java was reasonably young and was being hailed as a work of genius with it’s cross platform deployment capabilities. Programming was going to be revolutionised forever and all programs would run on any OS1{#footlink1:1253859827521.footnote}. Then Java wound up being most popular on the server side and liberated server code from the choice of OS more than the desktop side2{#footlink2:1253860194622.footnote}.

Server OS’s started to compete mostly on how well they were a server rather than what programs ran on them because what really mattered was that you could run the Java stack. In other words, Java became the platform that people deployed their applications to. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a single platform didn’t stand unchallenged for long. .NET sprang up as the big enterprise competitor to Java and all of a sudden you had to choose sides again.

The interesting thing is that another layer of platform abstraction is starting to spring up. Languages like Ruby and Python came from a background of running standalone and are now starting to abstract away the choice of the Java or .NET platform, just as Java abstracted away the choice between Linux, Windows or Solaris in it’s time.

From what I can tell, none of the languages have really developed a fully complete, heavy production ready, bet-the-company-on-it implementation for both the JVM and .NET but both Ruby and Python seem to come very close and have serious corporate sponsorship behind them. Right now the sense I get is that people are either using Iron Python or Jython, Iron Ruby or JRuby but not seriously deploying the same code to both. It doesn’t look like it will be long before doing so would be quite feasible though.

Exciting times ahead.

1 – Interestingly enough this has actually been the trend, but not because programs were developed in Java – it just inspired developers in other languages to build cross-platform abstraction libraries. ↩

2 – albeit not as smoothly as anyone would have liked↩