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Spoorti-Kotrashetti
Spoorti-Kotrashetti

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Alternate Middleware Option for Java: Background

This is the part-1 of the Alternate Middleware Option series....

I will be talking about my recent 6th semester team project here, "The Middleware Opensource Option/s".

The objective of the project was to explore the best alternate middleware for Java. Now, exploring for us was to choose the possible best language amongst the few good ones.
So I told my teammates to come up with 1 or 2 languages along with their respective features, advantages and disadvantages. Some of the top features included were the; security, purpose, scalability, use-cases, availability of libraries, community support and of course the ease. Once we were done with this, we started to analyze and compare the languages one by one based on the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) mentioned above.
When it was Python's turn to be compared and analyzed, we had the following observations:
1) Python's security is good enough.
2) It's dynamic semantics makes it more intuitive.
3) As it is an interpreted language, the debugging is easier here. But nothing comes for free, the easy debugging comes at the cost of speed.
4) But still what makes an interpreted language so great is it's portability.
5) We all know that Python is a trending language and so we tried finding out some top reasons for this which are as follows:
Main reason behind Python's popularity is the amount of use-cases it has in various domains like the AI/ML, Data Visualization, Web Development etc.
And why it has so many use-cases is because it's a general purpose language (it's not domain specific language). It is readable, it is versatile as it comes with tremendous amount of in-built libraries.
And of course, such a popular programming language would definitely have the greatest community support out there. Some of the popular ones are: StackOverflow, Dev Community, Reddit, Quora, StackExchange etc.

So these were some of the initial and important factors that made us choose PYTHON.
No technology can get a 100% replacement, because it has it's own standard and status in the market. But that doesn't mean one can not have an alternative...
Everything in the industry or the market will have at least one good alternative for it, it can be better than the existing one or can have close features to the existing one.

Some questions that we had during this part of the project:

1) Why to find alternate for Java, when it is so brilliant in almost all sense??
-> Because Java is no more free for production use. The organization needs to pay for the current version of Java SE 14.

2) What is a Middleware??
-> Middleware is like the bridge in between the Frontend, the backend and the Operating System. It is a software that provides common services to the applications beyond what's offered by the OS. It's like the connective tissue between the application, the data and the user. It runs between request-response cycle (between the client and the webserver).

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