Pitfals in Java, one of the most robust programming languages
In this article, I have tried to bring the challenges and problems that a developer faces while coding in Java. The features that it lacks in comparison to the other system and object oriented languages.
Peekaboo in flashback
When Sun introduced Java in 1995, little did it know that it is going to be a revolution in the world of coding and world wide web. The capabilities and versatility of this programming language have still not been tapped to their potential. It offered the coders and technical architects much more than they had expected, and hence became the most popular choice among them.Limitations of Java
We started from Java 1.0 and progressed to the most recent J2SE 7. There were enhanced capabilities, features attaining new dimensions and API s supporting the evolving needs and overcoming limitations and challenges.
However, the fact remains that nothing is perfect in this world. Java, being one of the strongest contenders in the league of most reliable, secure and dynamic programming language, still has some weaknesses and loopholes. Some of them are enumerated below-:
1. Very recently, there have been a number of security issues that have been reported. Java still has a long way to go to ensure that the real time applications are safe from threats pertaining to security and maintaining the state of data which is processed by them.
2. The conversion of Java source code into byte code makes the application secure and portable. Because of this, it is the speed of execution of the program that has to suffer.
3. Does not make use of polymorphism to its best. If we talk about compile time polymorphism, the feature of overloading has not best utilized in Java. The aspect of function overloading is covered, but in case of operator overloading, only '+' operator has been overloaded (the first case being addition of two numeric values and the other being concatenation of two Strings)
4. Java does not expose the lower level system details to the user. It rather puts a layer of abstraction (referred to as Java virtual machine). This refrains them from having a fine degree of control over the underlying operating system an other hardware devices. Till date, Java is not considered to be a suitable candidate for system programming.
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5. Memory management is not under the pre domination of programmer as there is no way to directly access the pointers that store the address of memory in which an entity resides. Also, there is no way by which the developer can manipulate the code to enable destruction of unused objects. The garbage collector takes a call on that.
6. Even after so many years since its inception, the Java programmers complain about the inefficient date-time API's in Java. They still have to depend on third party libraries for better functional capabilities for better presentation, manipulation and meaningful semantics. Java geeks, are still looking for an answer.
7. No support for performing arithmetic operations on unsigned integers.Do we have a solution to Java's limitations and security concerns?
Yes! We do have interface wrappers and other generator tools that allow us to partially eliminate the limitations of Java by allowing us to write Java code in conjunction with C/C++ and therefore exploiting their capabilities that are not supported by Java. In addition to this, they also enable other powerful features like rapid prototyping, interactive debugging etc.
