Beyond Java - Bruce Tate [11]
Microsoft captured a core of diligent developers more or less completely. Others bought some of the message, but cast a wary eye northwest. A growing core of developers looked openly for alternatives, like Novell's Netware or various Unix-based alternatives. Individual products, like Netscape Navigator, emerged to compete with Microsoft. The gathering storm seemed imminent.
The Internet
Thunder began to rumble in the distance, in the form of a rapidly growing Internet. In 1995, most people used the Internet to share static documents. Most dynamic sites were powered by command-line scripts through an interface called Common Gateway Interface (CGI) , in languages like Perl . That approach didn't seem to scale very well. While Perl was a very efficient language, applications were hard to read and difficult to maintain. And CGI started a new shell for each request, which proved prohibitively expensive. For enterprise computing, the Internet had the reputation of a limited toy, outside of scientific and academic communities.
In the mainstream, Microsoft seemed to miss the significance of the Internet, but many of the brightest minds in other places looked for ways to combine forces, to defang the dominant menace in the northwest. Market leaders always strive to protect their base through proprietary products and frameworks. Everyone else loves standards. IBM, which once built an empire on proprietary models encompassing hardware, software, and services, suddenly did an about-face, embracing every standard that it could find. It Internet-enabled its main products like its DB2 database through a product like net.data and its mainframe-based transaction engine through web-enabled emulators. Other companies also built better servers, and more efficient ways to share dynamic content. Netscape rose to prominence with a popular web browser. It looked for a way to share applications with documents, and found the answer in a fledgling language, recently renamed from Oak to Java. It started to rain.
Object Orientation
Object-oriented systems support three ideas that you now take for granted: encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. For many years, the industry had been working toward object-oriented programming (OOP) . They tried several times, but it never quite came together. The first major attempt was with Smalltalk . It was a highly productive environment, but when less-experienced developers tried to push it beyond its natural borders, they had problems. Initially, the early hype around OOP was counterproductive. It positioned OO languages as tools to achieve reuse, and suggested that inexperienced OOP teams could be many times more productive than their procedural counterparts.
Object-oriented software has the potential to be much less complex than procedural programming, but it takes some time to build the expertise to recognize patterns and to layer OO software in a way that makes sense. It also took the industry time to deliver educated developers. Though it now looks like OOP exploded overnight, that's not the case at all. After some early failures with languages like Smalltalk, systems programmers went back to the drawing board to deliver a less-ambitious version of an OOP language, and worked on delivering OOP concepts in a more limited way, as you see in Figure 2-1:
Smalltalk, invented in 1971, was successful as a research project, but did not experience the same