Java Development Services : Pros & Cons

Java is one of the most popular programming languages developed by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It offers performance, speed, multi-threading, platform independence, and easy maintenance. Java development services include web, mobile or desktop applications using Java as a programming language.

What type of Custom Software can be Developed in Java?

Java is a universal programming language. It can create many types of web, mobile and desktop applications. Custom software development using Java means creating an application in Java tailored to the client’s custom requirements.

We can create custom software in a wide range of fields like

Gaming: Gaming applications can be built using Java using frameworks like ​​LibGDX, jMonkeyEngine, and JavaFX. With these frameworks, we could create 2D and 3D graphics.

Big Data: Java has a lot of libraries and frameworks like Apache Hadoop, which is the first choice for big data applications for many, Spark and others.

Machine Learning: Java provides many libraries that support machine learning and artificial intelligence, like Weka, Deeplearning4j, Apache Mahout and Smile.

Financial Applications: Java provides features like security, scalability, multi-threading, and support for library integration which makes it suitable for financial applications.

Embedded Systems: Java has device compatibility, platform independence, high-security features, and real-time support. Embedded system applications can be built using Java. As it supports development using Java ME (Micro Edition).

Enterprise Applications: Java is suitable for scalable and secure enterprise applications because of its features. Following are a few examples of custom application development that can be done using Java.

Machine Learning and Big Data Applications: 

Java might not be the first language When talking about machine learning. But Java has been supporting machine learning since the early 2000s. 

Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) was one of the first libraries supporting Java machine learning. It was released in 1997 and is still used today. There are a lot of libraries and frameworks in Java—that help to build machine learning-based applications.

Examples: JavaML, Apache Mahout, Apache Spark MLib, Deeplearning4j, RapidMiner and more.

Top Java Web Frameworks

Java has been there for many decades now. With time, many frameworks have taken advantage of Java to provide ease of development. Here are some examples of top frameworks available for Java.

Spring Framework: Spring framework is the most widely used framework in Java. Spring framework can help build web and enterprise applications, including monolithic and microservice-based applications. The Spring framework family includes multiple frameworks like

• Spring MVC, Spring Core, Spring Integration, Spring Web Services, Spring Cloud, Spring Data, Spring Batch, Spring Test, Spring Security and Spring Boot.

Spring boot is the preferred framework for application development. The reasons for it are auto configurations, embedded servers, microservice support, faster development and developing production-ready applications with less effort.

Hibernate: Java is an object-oriented programming language. It uses concepts of classes and objects for developing applications. The databases we use, like SQL, do not support storing data in complex objects. Instead, it allows storing data in the form of rows and columns. Hibernate bridges the gap between these two data types by providing object-relational mapping capabilities. Hibernate is the top ORM framework used in Java. We have alternatives like MyBatis, JOOQ, EclipseLink, Spring data and more.

Play Framework: The play framework is used to develop web applications using Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. Play framework is used to create web-based applications using Java and Scala. Scala is also a programming language. It runs on Java Virtual Machine.

 The advantage of creating an application with a play framework is that the play framework has built-in support for reactive programming.

Dropwizard: Dropwizard is also a java based open source framework to build restful web services applications. Dropwizard is built on top of Jetty, Jersey and Jackson libraries. These frameworks provide additional features like metrics, logging and configuration management. It also includes features like health checks. Health Check is used to monitor the status of the application. It ensures that the application is functioning correctly. 

Apachehadop: Apache Hadoop is the most popular framework for creating custom software applications related to big data processing and visualization. That’s just some; more frameworks support custom software applications. 

Examples: Apache Spark, Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Storm and more.

Above are just a few examples; most application domains, categories or use cases could be built using Java.

Pros of Java Development Services

Faster Development: The main advantage of using Java over other programming languages is faster application development. The factors like production-ready application development using Spring boot, the auto configuration in the frameworks like Spring boot, robustness, and ease of learning as Java omits the headache of developers in managing the memory like allocation and deallocation of memory at runtime, which is handled internally by Java and deallocation using garbage collection, different data structures support with the help of collection framework, support of build tools which helps in faster development like ant, gradle and maven.   

Cross-platform Support: Using a compiler and interpreter makes the Java platform independent. This means we can write a Java application in one operating system. We make an executable file using the compiler. We run the application in any operating system without problems or compatibility issues.

Community Support: Java is the most widely used programming language for developing mobile, web-based and desktop applications. It has been used for decades, resulting in a large developer community. 

Whenever we face any issues while developing, there is a high probability that many other developers have faced this problem and they have found efficient solutions for the problem. This ensures less time spent reviewing documentation and fixing the particular problem. 

Scalability and Performance: Java provides excellent performance and highly scalable applications. This makes it suitable for developing enterprise-level applications that need to handle a high volume of requests and traffic. 

Easy Maintenance: Java is a backwards-compatible language. It provides new features in every iteration. But the applications written in older versions are not impacted. They run without causing any crashes or issues. Also, upgrading the application to newer versions or updating the features of the application is faster in Java.

Security: Java has built-in security features like error handling, exception handling capabilities, and conversion of Java code into bytecode which is not readable by others. 

It helps to prevent vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, buffer overflows, malware attacks and others. This makes Java a trendy choice for developing secure software applications.

Cons of Java Development Services

Performance: Java is considered a fast language. But as compared to C or C++, it is a bit slower. This can be one of the concerns while developing low latency support, as low latency support requires a quick response.

Memory Consumption: Java uses a lot of memory to execute applications in different locations. For this developer has no control over deallocating memory. It is handled by Java’s garbage collector to clean up memory. Memory clean-up happens once the CPU has completed all the tasks. This can sometimes cause issues when your server has less memory, like embedded systems and outdated mobile devices.

Java Comparison with Other Backend Programming Languages

Python

Python and Java are programming languages with many differences and advantages for different use cases.

• Syntax: Python has a straightforward syntax. The structure depends on the alignment and indentation. In contrast, Java has well-structured code and strict syntax. Developers need to follow that.
• Memory Management: Python uses garbage collection and reference counting. This may cause issues if the developer has flaws while coding in allocating or dereferencing memory. Whereas Java’s garbage collector runs periodically to clear all the unused memory.
• Use Cases: Python is usually used for data analysis, scripting, and machine learning. Java is used to create large and complex applications.
• Platform Dependence: Java and Python are both platform-independent programming languages. But Java is considered a solid independent platform because of the write-once-run-anywhere principle. It does not require any tweaks for any platform. 
• For Python, if there are any problems in the libraries for a specific operating system, we might have to fix the code in the library’s source code to fix the issue regarding that operating system.

C#

C# and Java are object-oriented high-level programming languages with well-structured syntax and runtime environments. 

• Platform: Java is a robust platform-independent programming language. Whereas C# is a .Net framework. This only has support on Windows operating systems.
• Performance: C# performs a bit faster when compared to programming because of single-platform support. 
• Community Support: Java and C# have been there for years. So both have excellent community support. But Java has been there longer than C#. Also, it is widely used on different platforms, resulting in better community support than C#.
• Cross-platform Development: Java supports cross-platform development using JavaFX and Xamarin. While C# supports cross-platform development using .NET core and Xamarin.

NodeJs

NodeJS and Java are both prevalent technologies for building web applications.

• Concurrency: Java provides built-in support for multi-threading applications. This allows multiple threads to process simultaneously. NodeJS runs on the principle of non-blocking I/O and an event-driven approach. This is useful for applications with a large number of concurrent connections.
• Frameworks: Java and NodeJS both have a large number of frameworks supported. It makes it very easy and convenient to code in Java and NodeJS. Java has top frameworks and libraries like Hibernate, Spring Boot, Struts and NodeJS and libraries like ExpressJS, Mongoose, and NextJS.
• Syntax: NodeJS uses dynamically typed syntax. This means the type of a variable is assigned at runtime. Java uses strictly typed syntax. That means we have to assign a data type to a variable while declaring the variable (now Java also supports dynamically typed syntax from Java 10 with the help of the var keyword).  
• Performance: In terms of performance, Java has better performance than Nodejs. Java is a compiled language, and nodejs is an interpreted language. Java has better memory management and utilizes multiple CPUs with the help of processes and threads.

Thinkitive – Java Development Services

We at Thinkitive provide lots of Java development services which include the following:

• Java Application Development: We provide services for Java application development in all applications like mobile-based, desktop-based and web-based restful services using Java. Apart from these, we also provide automation scripts using Java using Selenium.
• Java EE Development Services: We provide scalable and portable enterprise edition architecture services for high-traffic and high-throughput applications. We create customized applications for Business-To-Business based applications, internal applications for organizations and Business To Consumer applications using enterprise edition applications.
• Java Software Optimization: We provide Java services which are optimized and production-ready code. We take advantage of Java’s features and the frameworks or libraries we use. Writing code in Java is easy. But writing optimized code which leverages all the advantages of the language and frameworks takes a lot of work. We optimize the use of memory, multi-threadings, collection frameworks, optimizing the use of JPA and hibernate, and more.
• Java Web Application Development: We have experience developing large-scale web-based applications in various domains like HealthCare, Retail, E-commerce, Real Estate, Blockchain, Networking, Logistics, and more. We have experience developing applications in various web-based frameworks like Spring, Struts, Dropwizard, Play, Micronout, and more.

• Java Android Development: We have been delivering large-scale mobile applications for Android for years. We use Java and Kotlin programming languages. Kotlin uses the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). We have experience developing robust and complex applications in various domains, including IoT based applications.

• Java Software Modernization: We have experience migrating legacy applications to modern Java versions. We can upgrade dependencies, move from one framework to another, and convert monolithic apps to microservices. This gives us access to all the benefits of microservice-based applications.