Thinqing of linqing

July 9, 2007

I’ve been digging more in to groovy and grails lately - done more than toe-dipping but nothing I want to shout about yet.  The more I tested the collections and looping - syntax like doc.entry.findAllBy() stuff - I remembered linq (or is it LINQ?).  This is data access technology that will be central to Microsoft’s upcoming C#3.0 release.  I won’t pretend to be able to discuss it intelligently here - I don’t do much in the MS world right now.  However, I did see a demo of it this past January.  And so I started reading up on it some more, and found a number of Java-er reactions.  One in particular stuck out, and I believe this was an MSDN followup.  Both are a year old, but highlight what will likely be a big shift in the next few years.  Or not.  It’s easy to sit on the fence, but I do think that ultimately MS will have another big impact on how developers think about data access with LINQ.

One of the interesting comments in one of those posts was about how the ‘dynamic’ language crowd (I think he was particular talking about Ruby advocates) states that you have to have dynamic languages to provide some of the more flexible bits of functionality they provide.  Probably in large part that’s been true, although groovy/jruby/ironpython and other ‘dynamic’ languages running on ’static’ language VMs point out that it’s not a 100% requirement.  If MS can pull off making co-existing hybrid static/dynamic typing first-class, which LINQ seems to do, they’ll have another leg up on competing players for the next several years.

These sorts of things needs to be added at the system core.  MS can do it with .NET.  Sun (basically) has to do it with the JVM.  Given that Sun has a public perception of dragging their feet on the language, perhaps the recent open sourcing of Java will give some other larger players the ability to add these sorts of new ideas to Java.  But just ‘adding’ stuff in doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be integrated, or that there will be interesting tech to take advantage of it (though having the foundation would be a start).

I’m simply an interested bystander - I don’t have any particular horse in this race, but it’s certainly an interesting time to be watching these technologies evolve.

(Bonus points for anyone who got the Beatles reference in this post).

Posted in Development, Java, Microsoft, Software, XML, opensource