Re: Semantic Web Tools and Java

On 26 Feb 2010, at 06:24, Parnell Springmeyer wrote:

> Why are so many of the mature tools and libraries for RDF, OWL, and
> Topic Maps built atop Java? I know Python has some great tools and the
> Redland libs are mature too, but they pale in comparison to the number
> of tools built using Java.

Java is a big teaching and commercial language. It has a huge number of libraries. It's also big in the free / opensource world (see apache projects).

Where the cause and effect arrows go here I can't say, but there's a large and lively ecology. Note that this isn't the java language so much as the java platform: there are many languages available (see jruby, clojure, scala, groovy, jython, various schemes and lisps...).

> It also surprises me because the JVM is slow in comparison to compiled
> LISP (RDF expressed in S-Expressions?) and many other alternatives...

I'm pretty sure the internet has a discussion on the already.

> I've been a long time follower and partial implementer of the Semantic
> Web in my projects but this one point perplexes me (it's also because
> I'm not a Java programer).

Try clojure?

Damian

Received on Friday, 26 February 2010 14:40:59 UTC