Java is an interesting creation.  All through though the late 90's and to this day, it was spoken to be the answer to all the problems, even ones you weren't aware you had! It seems everywhere you turn you find a java program, or somebody trying to push java as the solution of the day.  Entire universities are retooling their curriculums to being heavily java centric.  Java is everywhere!

    Now lets not get to negative from the start.  I will admit that there are some places where java has its place.  There are some times when having the cross platform underpinnings are a god send.  Hell there are even a few nice features in the class libraries.

BUT

    For the love of god when will they get the whole memory footprint issue under control?!  Every time I turn around I have a javaw.exe or java.exe process gobbling up a hundred or so megabytes of my ram.  I understand that having all those cool memory management routines, and highly object oriented class libraries will cost a bit or main memory, but god-damn, Java is insane!

    The problem is further escalated when I run a comparison between .Net and Java.  Both are memory managed, both have massive class libraries, and both run under JIT conditions. All of the .Net applications I have written to date have been nice and compact in memory, granted they used more ram than a native Win32API app, it will still within reason.

    Today I was working on one of the many J2EE applications that powers the administrative systems at work.  A simple fix for a noon/midnight miscalculation problem.  I had to open a whole 3 files in the IDE to make the changes.  This is nothing when compared to my usual workflow in Visual Studio, which usually has me with 10 or so files open at any given time.  Regardless, it was a light work load.

    By coincidence, I had Task Manager running while I was dealing with a stubborn application, when I noticed my ram usage was through the roof.  A quick sort on Mem Usage reviled the following....

    Now we don't all have to be IT professionals to realize that one application using 318M of system memory is not a good thing.  In fact, its fucking insane.  Just because I have all that ram, doesn't mean one application should be taking it all for itself.  And worst of all, Eclipse was still slow and sluggish the entire time I was using it.  It is downright unacceptable for an application to be as bloated as this.  When we look at my Visual Studio instance, which had a rather large 4 project solution loaded, it was using less than 30M at the time I took this shot.  300 vs 30.... quite a difference if you ask me!  What on earth are they doing that is taking all of that ram?!

    Worse of all, the IDE is god damn horrible to use!   Not only is it slow, and a memory hog, it has absolutely no usability.  It is ugly and very very clunky to use.  In its default view, the editor window is barely wide enough to contain the standard variable assignment, let alone a few nested if statements.  I shouldn't have to be scrolling my editor window to see a whole if statement! Yes you can turn off these side bars, but then you cant browse your project at all without turning on the ugly space hogging sidebars again!   There is no such thing as a sliding panel.

    Is it all java's fault, no, but the memory and performance issues lie solely at its feet.  Stay tuned because next week I get to start using Java more and more as I slowly finish up the last of my .Net projects.  Fun Fun Fun!