Bruce Tate’s book Beyond Java has been published and there’s quite a lot of publicity for it appearing on the web. For example this article by Chris Adamson on the OnJava site. In the article Adamson interviews a number of well-known Java programmers about the future of Java.

The replies seem pretty unanimous that Java’s dominance is nearing it’s end. They seem to think that Java has become too top-heavy and that it’s becoming too complex to be usable. Oh, they all agree that it’ll still be around for some time (much as COBOL was for many years) but it’s surprising how many of them are looking closely at Ruby on Rails.

As someone who has never been a big fan of Java and who has always preferred the freedom of “dynamic languages”, it’s interesting to see so many respected Java programmers coming round to my way of thinking. The advantages of Ruby that they talk about are exactly the advantages that you’d get from any dynamic language. Sure, we get the same old tired nonsense about how Perl encourages untidy code but all in all it’s all starting to look like a good time to be a programmer specialising in dynamic languages.

Now, if only we can start marketing Catalyst as well as the Ruby on Rails people market their framework.